Build on the greenbelt now

the true enemy of our threatened wildlife like the nightingale is not housing but agricultural intensification ... 

There is now more bio-diversity in back gardens than on English farms. ... 

Intensively farmed land has a negligible - even negative - environmental value and is almost sterile from the point of view of wild life; take a look at the 2011 National Ecosystem Assessment. That is the sort of land we should be allowing houses to be built on. The vehement opposition to building on any intensively farmed greenbelt land fails to recognise it for what it is - almost worthless from a social, environmental or amenity perspective. 

Paul Cheshire, Emeritus Professor of Economic Geography at LSE

Guardian economics fail #636352747

If the Guardian's economics leader writer actually knew even the very first thing about economics, he might be able to recognise that an increase in supply normally leads to a decrease in prices. And so new tall buildings in London should generally be celebrated for being exactly what is needed to cut rents, and are basically a total economic free lunch for the city and the country. And if you don't believe me, try the leading urban economists at Harvard or the LSE.

Sex, fame, and economic geography

"We seek cities because there are a greater range of girls at the bar, of reproductive choice. Number one. 

Number two is there are better outcomes for health and wealth. And now we care more about the environment, and cities are better for the environment. But above all, talented people seek cities for fame. They can't get famous in the fucking village."

Boris Johnson. I'm not a fan, but it's a great quote. 

Development: People or Places?

The Guardian's economics leader writer (with a.... history qualification?) has a long rant about the de-industrialisation of Britain, claiming that the government has written off an entire region. Here's the thing - I sadly don't have time to reference all of this but;

1 - Globalisation is not a government policy - it is a thing that is happening.
2 - Government-led area-based regeneration generally doesn't work
3 - So - government policy should be, and largely is, about supporting individuals wherever they live. The best that we can do to respond to the shift in jobs from the North-East to the South-East, is ensure that wherever they are born, kids get a great education giving them an equal opportunity to compete, and making it easy to move to where jobs are (allowing more house-building in the South-East would help with this).

So - support people not places - and let people move. Or social protection and migration. Works in Britain. Sound anything like a recipe for global development?

Addendum: Here's the thing about Thatcher - when she said "let Liverpool decline," she probably basically had the economics about right, as with weakening the unions, and as the Nigerian government with fuel subsidies today. Just don't be such a **** about it yeah?

Crowded Planet?

World population is expected to hit 7 billion people this month. So are we running out of space? Not if we all move to cities. This chart from Paul Romer's TED talk represents the space that the world's 3 billion city dwellers take up of all the arable land on the planet. It's 3%.

Census love

"In the absence of actual data (such as an official census), NGO staff make a back-of-envelope estimate in order to plan their projects; a postgraduate visiting the NGO staff tweaks that estimate for his thesis research; a journalist interviews the researcher and includes the estimate in a newspaper article; a UN officer reads the article and copies the estimate into her report; a television station picks up the report and the estimate becomes the headline; NGO staff see the television report and update their original estimate accordingly." (source: www.humanitarian.info) (via Map Kibera Project)

I honestly had no idea that Kibera is less than 200,000 people, and not over a million, despite the Kenyan census establishing this fact taking place 2 years ago. Via the Africa Research Institute

Why the left should support the new UK planning rules

Relaxing Britain’s planning rules will be good for growth, for the environment, and for social mobility.

The countryside lobby is selling a straw man. Developers generally don’t want to concrete over our beautiful rural countryside just for the sake of it. There is little value in building in the middle of nowhere. The most valuable place to build new commercial and residential properties is where prices are high - the wealthy and productive South-East - areas that are already developed. By increasing housing density in the South-East, we can allow more people to move there. More dense urban areas are more productive, as scale allows for greater economic diversity, and for new ideas to be freely shared.

New building will also bring down prices, allowing poorer people to live in productive areas. If we are serious about social mobility, we need to allow poor households the opportunity to live close to jobs in high productivity parts of the country (and without expensive government subsidies).

Finally, dense urban areas are better for the environment than small countryside towns, because in urban areas people walk, cycle, or take public transport rather than drive everywhere.

For once, this is a genuinely progressive policy from the Tories. The left should embrace it.

Sadly economic geography is tragically misunderstood by the public. But there is a pretty much a consensus from economists on this issue. Two great recent books by Ed Glaeser at Harvard and Ryan Avent of The Economist make the case for less planning regulation in the US. Henry Overman, Director of the Spatial Economics Research Centre at the LSE, argues that the changes in the UK do not go far enough.

Oxford

How about a specific example for clarity? This is Oxford. The whole area to the South East of Oxford is pretty built up, from Cowley Road down to Blackbird Leys. Binsey, on the other hand, less than a mile North West of the train station (which gets you to London in 50 minutes), has a population of, er, 28 (at least it did in 2001).



I love the countryside. I really do. But the average value of rural land in Oxfordshire is £21k per ha. The average value of suburban land on the edge of Oxford is £4,000,000 per ha. It is utter madness to not build on Binsey.

The Labour government's Barker report led to outrage about "building over the green belt."

Here's a picture of the Green Belts in the UK. 

Would it really be so bad if we let some towns and cities like Oxford expand? Isn't there a bit of space left in Oxfordshire besides the thick ring around the town?

-----

Update:

Yeah...... so Cynan in the comments posted the link to this Oxford flood plain map. Perhaps Binsey wasn't the best example in the world. And yet.... Christchurch still wanted to build there, presumably knowing about the flood plain. And.... Amsterdam? Or rather, the 25% of the entire Netherlands which is below sea level? 

7 reasons why urban growth is a natural and normal phenomenon

The town of Dubai first conducted a census in 1968 (with approximately 59,971 inhabitants then) ... According to the Statistics Centre of Dubai, the population of the emirate is estimated to be over 1,800,000 as of 2010 ... Do the math!  

(HT: Our Word is Our Weapon).

OK. I make that an annual growth rate of 8%, not to be sniffed at. 108%. Dubai has more than doubled in population every year for the past 42 years.(Hey - this is a blog - there is very little editing and short deadlines, so occasionally there will be very stupid mistakes).

Rapid urban growth is not an inherently evil thing. In fact it is probably quite a good thing. Professor Mario Polèse offers 7 reasons why:

Seven Pillars of Agglomeration:

1. Economies of scale in production: For many industries, the average cost of producing goods declines as the scale of production expands. This can make it very profitable to concentrate production in a few large facilities and to locate those facilities close to lots of workers, namely near cities.

2. Economies of scale in trade and transportation: Delivery costs are lower when the trucks, planes, and ships going to and from transit hubs are fully loaded with goods. Filling trucks, planes, and ships is easier when they’re moving between urban areas with large ports, airports, and distribution centers.

3. Falling transportation and communication costs: Falling transport costs allow firms to exploit economies of scale, producing in one place and distributing to a large and geographically diverse market by road, air, or sea. Similarly, declining communications costs allow firms to concentrate productive activity in one place and distribute services to a wider market via airwaves, radio frequencies, and fiber optic cables.

4. The need for proximity with other firms in the same industry: Face to face interaction is important in industries where creativity, inspiration, imagination, or the cultivation of trust are key inputs. Proximity with other firms also lowers recruitment and training costs since a firm will have ready access to workers with industry-relevant skills.

5. The advantage of diversity: For firms, such as ad agencies, that need a workforce with a diverse skill set, will be better able to find and recruit workers from many different speciallized backgrounds if they locate near large cities where many different industries cluster.

6. The quest for the center: Firms that need direct access to customers will naturally locate in the geographic center of their markets. In many cases, this will mean locating in or near big cities. Polèse points to the example of Broadway. The concentration of performing arts in New York reflects access to the large local population but also theatergoers from other metropolitan areas that are linked to New York by rail, air, and road.

7. Buzz and bright lights: Cities with amenities like food, nightlife, museums, recreation, culture, and shopping tend to attract more people. Economists Ed Glaeser, Jed Kolko, and Albert Saiz find that high amenity cities grow faster than low amenity cities. They also observe that urban rents rise faster than urban wages, suggesting that people want to live in cities for reasons beyond rising wages. Even as information technology makes it possible for an increasing number of people to work from nearly anywhere in the world, the amenities associated with city life continue to attract and retain urban residents.

In praise of slums

"As the fastest urbanising continent in the world, Africa is not only confronted with the challenge of improving the lives of slum dwellers but also the challenge of preventing the formation of new slums," said Joan Clos, executive director of UN-Habitat.

Really Joan? What's your counterfactual? An imaginary nice clean yuppie living in a nice clean neighbourhood? An imaginary happy-clappy rural farmer?

Slums are created when people leave their rural village to go in search of a better life/more money in the city. Slums aren't some kind of alien cancerous growth, they are the result of natural economic forces (*cough* WDR 2009 *cough*), of people becoming more productive when they are closer together, and can more easily exchange their ideas, their labour and their services. Africa may be the fastest urbanising continent in the world but that's probably because it was the least urbanised to begin with. Urbanisation is a good thing.

The breakneck transformation of a rural population into a predominantly urban one is neither good nor bad on its own, says UN-Habitat. 

But

They are already inundated with slums and a tripling of urban populations could spell disaster, unless urgent action is initiated today. This situation threatens stability and also entire nations," it said.

Enough with the alarmist nonsense please. For a look at some of the life and vitality and optimism of urban Africa, check out the BBC documentary Welcome to Lagos.

Why is Yale so small?

Or rather the town of New Haven, which you probably haven't heard of, in which Yale sits.

Sam* got me thinking about this with this article he sent me recently, on repopulating urban america.

Now bear with me, but I can half-remember a talk by an LSE economic geographer (Henry Overman?), arguing that Oxford and Cambridge (UK) are underpopulated. Agglomerations matter. In the 19th Century industrial age Manchester grew rapidly as the centre of manufacturing. In the modern information economy, universities are the drivers of growth, and these places should naturally be expanding. In the UK this natural growth is restricted by green belts (I believe they call it zoning in the US).

So what's going on in Yale?


* Ooh snazzy new website, check you out. Nice tagline.

Garang's Infrastructure Plan

Dr. John Garang was an economist (phd from Iowa), and so I'm sure this infrastructure plan with connections to DRC, Uganda and Kenya (but not the North) was all about economic geography and not at all politics. The red lines are railway tracks by the way. Ambitious.

The World is not Flat

The latest World Development Report is all about economic geography.

Distance, Density and Division matter.

Distance because of those transport costs, density because agglomeration raises productivity - cities are better for growth than the countryside, and artificial divisions raise costs of trade.

What does all this imply for Southern Sudan? At the moment market traders rely on both Khartoum and Uganda.

There are 2 key policy messages from the report - infrastructure and trade barriers.

The strategic question is how much the South chooses to orientate itself towards integration with the Khartoum, and how much with the East African Community. The goal is to make links through improved transport and reduced administrative barriers to a successful agglomeration. At the moment there aren't any passable roads from the South to the North, so goods get flown in. Goods from Uganda and Kenya do get brought in by road.

One way to think about this is Sachs' GDP density, which basically gives you a map of where these agglomerations are.



Zooming in on Africa, its pretty clear that Lake Victoria is where all the action is at. This is pretty convenient for Juba which is only just across the Ugandan border, but not so much for the big towns like Aweil in Bahr el Ghazal, which are closer to Khartoum than Kampala.




This idea is also reflected in the raw population densities - far more people around Lake Victoria than in Khartoum (Addis also has a lot of people, but there are some mountains in the way).



Trouble is that it seems from what weak data there is that the largest agglomeration in Southern Sudan is also the furthest from the Ugandan border, in Northern Bahr el Ghazal.



And unsurprisingly it is Central and Western Equatoria next to the Ugandan border that are doing the best, and the more populous States in Bahr el Ghazal and Upper Nile that are doing the worst.