In economics, economic rent is any payment to an owner or factor of production in excess of the costs needed to bring that factor into production. In classical economics, economic rent is any payment made or benefit received for non-produced inputs such as location (land) and for assets formed by creating official privilege over natural opportunities. In the moral economy of neoclassical economics, economic rent includes income gained by labor or state beneficiaries of other "contrived" exclusivity, such as labor guilds and unofficial corruption.
Downtown is a term primarily used in North America by English speakers to refer to a city's commercial, cultural and often the historical, political and geographic heart, and is often synonymous with its central business district (CBD). It is marked by a cluster of tall buildings, cultural institutions and the convergence of rail transit and bus lines. In British English, the term "city centre" is most often used instead.
Urban structure is the arrangement of land use in urban areas, in other words, how the land use of a city is set out. Urban planners, economists, and geographers have developed several models that explain where different types of people and businesses tend to exist within the urban setting. Urban structure can also refer to urban spatial structure, which concerns the arrangement of public and private space in cities and the degree of connectivity and accessibility.
Urban economics is broadly the economic study of urban areas; as such, it involves using the tools of economics to analyze urban issues such as crime, education, public transit, housing, and local government finance. More specifically, it is a branch of microeconomics that studies urban spatial structure and the location of households and firms.
The term inner city has been used, especially in the United States, as a euphemism for majority-minority lower-income residential districts that often refer to run down neighborhoods, in a downtown or city centre area. Sociologists sometimes turn the euphemism into a formal designation by applying the term inner city to such residential areas, rather than to more geographically central commercial districts.
Urban sprawl is the unrestricted growth in many urban areas of housing, commercial development, and roads over large expanses of land, with little concern for urban planning. In addition to describing a special form of urbanization, the term also relates to the social and environmental consequences associated with this development. Since the advent of the industrial era, sprawl has entailed no direct disadvantages, such as the loss of protection from medieval city walls. However, its disadvantages and costs include increased travel time, transport costs, pollution, and destruction of countryside. The cost of building the infrastructure needed for new developments is hardly ever recouped through property taxes, amounting to a huge subsidy for the developers and new residents at the expense of existing property taxpayers. In Continental Europe, the term peri-urbanisation is often used to denote similar dynamics and phenomena, but the term urban sprawl is currently being used by the European Environment Agency. There is widespread disagreement about what constitutes sprawl and how to quantify it. For example, some commentators measure sprawl only with the average number of residential units per acre in a given area, but others associate it with decentralization, discontinuity, segregation of uses, and so forth.
The concentric zone model, also known as the Burgess model or the CCD model, is one of the earliest theoretical models to explain urban social structures. It was created by sociologist Ernest Burgess in 1925.
The sector model, also known as the Hoyt model, is a model of urban land use proposed in 1939 by land economist Homer Hoyt. It is a modification of the concentric zone model of city development. The benefits of the application of this model include the fact it allows for an outward progression of growth. As with all simple models of such complex phenomena, its validity is limited.
The multiple nuclei model is an economical model created by Chauncy Harris and Edward Ullman in the 1945 article "The Nature of Cities".
Johann Heinrich von Thünen, sometimes spelled Thuenen, was a prominent nineteenth century economist and a native of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, now in northern Germany.
Pay-per-click (PPC) is an internet advertising model used to drive traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays a publisher when the ad is clicked.
Real estate economics is the application of economic techniques to real estate markets. It tries to describe, explain, and predict patterns of prices, supply, and demand. The closely related field of housing economics is narrower in scope, concentrating on residential real estate markets, while the research on real estate trends focuses on the business and structural changes affecting the industry. Both draw on partial equilibrium analysis, urban economics, spatial economics, basic and extensive research, surveys, and finance.
Land-use forecasting undertakes to project the distribution and intensity of trip generating activities in the urban area. In practice, land-use models are demand-driven, using as inputs the aggregate information on growth produced by an aggregate economic forecasting activity. Land-use estimates are inputs to the transportation planning process.
Suburbanization is a population shift from central urban areas into suburbs, resulting in the formation of (sub)urban sprawl. As a consequence of the movement of households and businesses out of the city centers, low-density, peripheral urban areas grow.
A peak land value intersection is the region within a settlement with the greatest land value and commerce. As such, it is usually located in the central business district of a town or city, and has the greatest density of transport links such as roads and rail. Other hallmarks indicating a PLVI are tall buildings and a relatively great number of pedestrians.
Location theory has become an integral part of economic geography, regional science, and spatial economics. Location theory addresses questions of what economic activities are located where and why. Location theory or microeconomic theory generally assumes that agents act in their own self-interest. Firms thus choose locations that maximize their profits and individuals choose locations that maximize their utility.
Friction of distance is a core principle of Geography that states that movement incurs some form of cost, in the form of physical effort, energy, time, and/or the expenditure of other resources, and that these costs are proportional to the distance traveled. This cost is thus a resistance against movement, analogous to the effect of friction against movement in classical mechanics. The subsequent preference for minimizing distance and its cost underlie a vast array of geographic patterns from economic agglomeration to wildlife migration, as well as many of the theories and techniques of spatial analysis, such as Tobler's first law of geography, network routing, and cost distance analysis. To a large degree, friction of distance is the primary reason why geography is relevant to many aspects of the world, although its importance has been decreasing with the development of transportation and communication technologies.
Rental value is the fair market value of property while rented out in a lease. More generally, it may be the consideration paid under the lease for the right to occupy, or the royalties or return received by a lessor (landlord) under a license to real property. In the science and art of appraisal, it is the amount that would be paid for rental of similar real property in the same condition and in the same area.
Zone of transition is the area between the factory zone and the working-class zone in the concentric zone model of urban structure devised by Ernest Burgess. The zone of transition is an area of flux where the land use is changing.
The Core frame model is a model showing the urban structure of the Central Business District of a town or city. The model was first suggested by Ronald R. Boyce and Edgar M. Horwood in 1959.
