Urban performance at different boundaries in England and Wales through the settlement scaling theory

ABSTRACT

The relationship between transport-led agglomeration and economic performance is evaluated in an English and Welsh context. We examine the effects of scale, i.e., inter- versus intra-city mobility infrastructure, on urban size–cost performance. An additional contribution of this paper lies in its use of power-law scaling models of urban systems, enabling an assessment of optimality in the trade-off between economic output and mobility costs accounting for ease of access within cities coupled with their built density. Findings suggest economic underperformance coincides with inadequate mobility at both inter- and intra-city scales, while overperformance is accompanied by overgrown urbanized area and escalating mobility costs.

KEYWORDS:

• agglomeration
• urban scaling
• scaling laws
• urban performance
• infrastructure planning

JEL:

• O18
• R00
• R41

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors thank Philip McCann for both helpful discussions and comments on the manuscript. Population data are from Census 2011, Office for National Statistics (ONS); maps contain OS Map data © Crown copyright and database rights 2017.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Interested readers are encouraged to view the detailed derivation of the model based on a hierarchical urban infrastructure network and the optimization of output–energy balance in the supplemental data online of Bettencourt (2013).

2. Although not of importance to the focus of this paper, note that the simplicity of the OECD method might cause problems when aggregating back up to units not so larger than the base population layer resulting in linear scalings or noise recordings (Smith, 2014) due to the nature of the simple population proportionality and the uniform density distribution assumption in equation (7). For an expanded discussion, see Appendix A in the supplemental data online.

3. The numerical value of the theoretically optimal $G^{\ast }$ is not independent of the exponents observed for economic output and urbanized area. It is the overall maximization of $Y-W$ that does not depend on specific values of the exponents.

4. For OLS regression estimates of scaling exponents using all units in each boundary, see Appendix A in the supplemental data online.

5. For larger figures, see in Appendix A in the supplemental data online.