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Urban Land Use: Theories and Models


Background

Cities are distinctive ensembles of people, businesses and institutions and are easily distinguished by the number and density of economic, social and cultural activities that take place within them. Many cities have unique characteristics such as the Boston's North End, the French Quarter in New Orleans, or the monuments and Federal buildings of Washington, DC that make them distinctive places to see and visit. But even these cities share a great deal in common with other less distinctive places. The most visible characteristic of cities is the form of their built environment -- tall buildings located at the city's center, outlying areas of manufacturing and distribution, and residential areas with greater density near the center than in the suburbs. It is the location of these, and other, activities that define patterns of urban land use.
  

Cities, and the associated process of urbanization, are the product of industrialization and changes in technology. As industrialization proceeded, many types of business found it advantageous to cluster together and form agglomerations of economic activity. Benefits from agglomeration, called agglomeration economies, is an important concept in understanding why cities developed. Technological change in industry, transportation, communications, and building techniques provided the necessary requisites for urban growth.  
Three Distinctive Cities 
a) The Nation's Capitol, Washington, DC.  b) The French Quarter, New Orleans, LA.  c) Seattle, WA skyline at night.
 While the form of urban places has changed dramatically, particularly in the last 50 years, the basic structure of cities has been remarkably resilient. The core of urban places typically evolved around the nexus of transportation routes (roads, streetcar lines, railroads, ports, etc.) which were critical in shipping and receiving industrial products. The same lines of transportation that radiated from the city's central business district (CBD) also brought people to the center for work and shopping. Innovations in building practices, including the use of reinforced concrete, allowed large structures to be erected which helped shape the built environment and define the function and patterns of urban land use, many of which persist to this day.

Many of the same innovations have changed the patterns of urban land use. Widespread use of trucks and automobiles traveling on interstate highways and beltways has allowed households and businesses to locate outside the central city in suburban locations where densities and land costs are lower. The process of suburban growth is frequently discussed in terms of "sprawl" where development and the built environment are horizontal, rather than vertical as in the CBD. Over time, suburban growth has changed the form of urban places from being monocentric, with most economic activity located in the center of the city, to being polycentric forms with several nodes in the urban area around which businesses and households locate.
 
 
Despite the unique attributes of many urban places, there are some striking similarities among American cities. As a general rule, land prices decline with distance from the CBD. Consequently, land use intensity increases as one moves closer to the city's center. Even in urban areas with large suburban commercial developments, called edge cities, land prices are positively correlated with accessibility (i.e. more accessible parcels of land are more expensive). Finally, both producers and consumers make trade-offs between the price of land and its characteristics in terms of location, accessibility, quality, and other attributes. The outcome of numerous location decisions by businesses, households and governments produce a complex urban mosaic of business districts, shopping centers, government centers and residential neighborhoods characterized by different land uses. 

The study of urban land use is important to geographers who have attached significant importance to the role of accessibility in determining patterns of land use in a market economy. However, accessibility is a relative term and to understand patterns of urban land use, we must ask the question "Accessible to what?" This question is addressed in the discussion of bid rent and location gradients. To begin, however, we should look at the descriptive models urban land and examine the general patterns of urban land use that have become so important in the study of urban geography.

   
Bank of America Corporate Center, Charlotte, NC. Located in the heart of Charlotte's CBD, Bank of America is a good example of intensive land use.  This sixty story building houses 3,000 employees and occupies an entire city block.  In 2000, Bank of America controlled about $642 billion in total assets. Photo by Harrison Campbell
 
 

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