Open research questions in Urbanization and City Planning

What the literature leaves open

• Future research should integrate spatial– economic modeling, leverage richer micro-data (including transaction and mobility records), track time-series dy- namics across announcement, construction, and comple- tion, and expand attention to under-studied domains such as commercial and industrial renewal and diverse govern- ance arrangements.

  Impacts of urban renewal on housing prices: A systematic review and meta-analysis · 2026 · DOI

• However, while in the West, there are running discussions on theories of uneven development aiming at understanding causes of inequalities, analyses from CEE are scarcely linked to these theoretical debates.

  Characteristics and courses of uneven development in Central and Eastern Europe: The evolution of places of underdevelopment · 2026 · DOI

• We studied fairness in Reconstruct and Divide projects by considering two com- mon fairness notions: envy-freeness and proportionality. We characterized when envy-free and proportional assignments exist. Since such assignments are not al- ways guaranteed, we focused on minimizing envy and disproportionality through 30 assignment and payment vectors. We showed that the maximum attainable envy equals the maximum average mean cycle cost in the difference envy-graph. However, we could not find a polynomial- time algorithm that guarantees an optimal solution. Whether such an algorithm exists remains an open question. On the positive side, we proposed a mechanism that minimizes maximum dispro- portionality. We also introduced a characteristic-based elicitation method to reduce manipulation. We also identified conditions under which the mechanism is resistant to safe manipulations. Extending these results to broader settings and identifying additional manipulation-resistant conditions remains an open direction. We assumed that improvements are measured by differences; the model where improvements are measured by ratios is also conceptually appealing, but our current results for it are limited. Developing deeper theoretical insights in this model is a key area for future research. In future work, we plan to expand our survey to include a larger and more di- verse group of participants Our findings also highlight the importance of developing improved allocation methods that further reduce envy. In addition, we aim to gain a deeper understanding of the behavioral endowment effect through follow-up ex- periments designed to more accurately quantify its influence on perceived fairness and allocation outcomes.

  Fair Allocation of Improvements: When Old Endowments Shape New Assignments · 2026 · DOI

• The findings demonstrate that integrating BDM with statistical analysis provides a replicable and cost-effective tool for fine-scale demographic research in rural environments with limited data availability, thereby supporting methodological development and spatial planning.

  Building-Level Binary Dasymetric Mapping and Spatial-Statistical Analysis of Population Change in Rural Serbia · 2025 · DOI

• Cities like Minneapolis, Sacramento, Austin, and Spokane have redrawn their zoning maps and removed non-zoning barriers to housing production such as minimum parking requirements; meanwhile, New York City is moving ahead with its prohousing “City of Yes” plan, though its ultimate fate remains uncertain.

  Supply and the Housing Crisis A Debate · 2025 · DOI

• In spite of the terminological ambiguities discussed in the paper and lack of agreement on ways to distinguish the two concepts as well as significant difficulties in their operationalization the analysis presented in the current study demonstrates that there does exist a case for a distinction in the treatment of suburbanization and peri-urbanization in many post-socialist urban regions.

  How are suburbanization and peri-urbanization not the same? Key differences in urban regions in Central and Eastern European countries: the case of cities in southern Poland · 2023 · DOI

• 2This phenomenon is of great interest for the production of space 3 in those large socialist housing estates, as the communist state successfully used the skills of rural residents to complete "socialist utopian projects" when the necessary resources to properly arrange the spaces between blocks were insufficient.

  From Temporary Spatial Practices to Permanent Architectural Forms.The Case of “La Terenuri” from Mănăștur Neighborhood, Cluj-Napoca · 2022 · DOI

• Work-related population flows did not undergo major transformations and the range of influence of local labor markets was still mainly limited to the new towns’ own gminas, which together with the directly neighboring gminas formed functional urban areas that nonetheless rarely exceeded the boundaries of the poviat.

  Development of new towns in Poland. A case study of local labor markets. · 2022 · DOI

• Interviews with representatives of 18 international and domestic organisations reveal that, while there is agreement concerning the city’s main challenges, there is also a lack of consensus about how best to tackle them.

  Competing organisational perspectives on rapid urbanisation and its management: a case study of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia · 2017 · DOI

• However, limited research has been conducted into how land‐based capital is mobilized, accumulated and circulated within the circuits of the capital accumulation process, or how land‐based capital is used to finance massive investment in suburbanization by China's local governments, especially since the trend in land commodification during the 2000s.

  Financing China's Suburbanization: Capital Accumulation through Suburban Land Development in Hangzhou · 2016 · DOI

• Significant challenges remain to be addressed for both types of resettlement, including establishing two-way communication between villagers and the government about resettlement plans and providing better financial support for the resettlers, safeguards for the livelihoods of non-movers, and post-resettlement support programmes to help resettlers adjust to their new environments.

  Spatial restructuring through poverty alleviation resettlement in rural China · 2016 · DOI

• Previous scholarly work suggested annexation might play a role (Stauber, 1965; Rigos & Spindler, 1997; Smith & Debbage, 2006), yet the cause of clustering remains unknown as few scholars have actually studied the phenomenon.

  The Great Defection: How New City Clusters Form to Escape County Governance · 2015

• Both predictions force us to ignore the fact that miserable housing and living conditions and uncontrolled violence prevail in cities of all sizes and rural areas as well, that for decades the fastest-growing cities in just about every region of the world have been small and medium-sized, and that signs of a convergence between North and South are mostly limited to the exclusive elite districts that have been there, reproducing themselves, since the colonial period.

  Urban Latin America · 2013 · DOI

• Despite encouraging changes since 2010, many factors underlying the government's failures remain unchanged, thus the fate of low-income housing remains uncertain.

  Low-income Housing in Chinese Cities: Policies and Practices · 2012 · DOI

• However,current research on Chinese peri-urbanization is generally focused on the description of its unique characteristics of an identified peri-urbanization area at a specific year,and there are very few studies on the dynamic change of peri-urbanization areas and the comparison of different peri-urbanization areas.

  The change of spatial distribution of peri-urbanization areas in Hangzhou Municipality · 2008 · DOI

• While it is beyond the scope of this paper to estimate the causes of these changes, this paper argues that a complete understanding of the changes in the nature of US urban spatial structures is likely to go beyond the standard explanations based on the monocentric city model such as decreases in transportation costs and increases in household incomes.

  CHANGES IN THE NATURE OF URBAN SPATIAL STRUCTURE IN THE UNITED STATES, 1890–2000* · 2007 · DOI

• The report identifies gaps in research on urban well-being (Chapter V), fertility and reproductive health (Chapter VI), mortality (Chapter VII), and migration (Chapter VIII).

  Cities Transformed: Demographic Change and its Implications in the Developing World (review) · 2004 · DOI

• The purpose of this paper is to gather together much of the scattered material on Belize City, in the hope that this codification will help the reader to understand the growth and present status of the city, and, perhaps, inspire others to do further research on this, still the major urban centre of Belize.

  The Growth and Development of Belize City · 1986 · DOI

• Probably the most extensive use of time-budget research is to be found in the Eastern European countries. Beginning in 1924 with the Russian Strumilin, there have been numerous efforts to improve policy and planning for the labor force, industry, transportation systems, etc., through the use of time-budget research. T h e historical comparison made by Prudensky in 1959, using his own and Strumilin’s initial data, on Moscow, is probably the first of its kind (Szalai, 1966a:4-5) and clearly demonstrates the changes that industrialization has brought to the time and activity patterns in Russia. Among other things the comparison shows that, over the thirty-five-year span, time spent in productive work has declined for both men and women by nearly half an hour, although private or self-gain work time has increased slightly. T h e greatest decrease appears to be in the time spent by women in meal preparation-more than an hour less time in 1959 as compared to 1924, while the greatest increase has been in “lost time” or time spent in journey-towork for men, and in waiting and shopping for women -again more than an hour for the former and nearly half an hour for the latter; the effects of urban scale are clearly seen here. Women appear to have gained the most in the Soviet Union over these years: their discretionary time (i.e., for education, recreaton, and entertainment) increased by more than half an hour. This would appear to be an outcome of the Soviet policy to equalize opportunity for women, although it should be noted that they still had less discretionary time available in 1959 than men (10.1 percent versus 14.1 percent), which, as the Vienna Center multinational study results seem to show, would indicate that even where there are direct policies to facilitate it, the equalization of “free time” for men and women is still a thing of the future (Szalai, 1972). I n Western Europe and the United States, the timebudget research effort has been directed almost exclusively to a study of discretionary or leisure time activities. Moreover, from the earliest studies carried out in the 1930s (Lundberg, 1934, and Sorokin and Berger, 1939), the interest has been primarily academic rather than administrative. T h e leisure time focus did ultimately evolve into and was often related to mass media studies where the interest became more practical: how to measure audience potential. In fact, the largest surveys ever carried out anywhere were for this purpose; the Japanese NHK Radio and TV Culture Research Institute has periodically surveyed u p to 170,000 persons in order to better plan their radio and television programing (Naomichi, 1963). T h e most comprehensive effort at comparative timeuse study was undertaken in the mid-1960s by the Vienna Coordination Center for Research and Documentation in the Social Sciences, with Alexander Szalai heading a team composed of representatives from nearly a dozen (mostly European) countries. Each country’s study was self-financed. A common two-digit activity code was adopted, with an optional third digit 382 AIP JOUKNAL NOVEMBER 1973 Downloaded by [University of Windsor] at 04:21 20 November 2014 for special studies. T h e sample size was standardized at a minimum of 2000, and the site was agreed to be an essentially industrial city ranging in population size from 25,000 to 225,000, although most were over the 100,000 mark, and some countries carried out national surveys, as well. A standard set of demographic information was required from all participants, and an optional set was left open for individual interests, as in the activities code. T h e information from these surveys, most of which were completed in 1965-1966, has now been recorded on computer tapes and was made available to a11 participants from the Vienna Center as well as now from Professor Pierre Feldheim, the newly appointed chairman of the Research Group on Time-Budgets and Social Activities.1 Preliminary results from this large-scale national and comparative study were reported at the congresses of the International Sociological Association at Evian, France, in 1966, and Varna, Bulgaria, in 1970, as well as in the American Behaviorial Scientist (Szalai, Dec. 1966). T h e main volume (Szalai) was published in 1972.

  The Time-Budget—Activity Systems Perspective in Urban Research and Planning · 1973 · DOI

• Certainly the fact that Clydeside has a less elastic supply of female labour relative to other parts of Scotland may explain why some industries have settled elsewhere but this does not account for the location decisions of predominantly male-employing activities. (d) Migrant Companies and Clydeside Growth Though the conclusion on fixed investment and productivity growth is inconclusive.

  ECONOMIC ANALYSIS FOR A DECLINING URBAN ECONOMY · 1971 · DOI

• in concern over economic well-being Poverty and related survival issues have ccnsumed the energy and the ghetto. Consequently, writers on economic conditions in the ghetto place great stress on alleviating, even eliminating poverty, and not accelerating economic development. Paradoxically though, even in poverty programs economic development "has not been taken seriously as part of a total antipoverty strategy." (Gerson Green and Geoffrey Faux, p. 24 in Haddad and Pugh, eds., 1969). Concern for development is also marked by a reluctance to embrace its underlying premises. Influential analysts-black and white- have dissipated energy on the exaggerated dilemma of development as a means of increasing racial segregation rather than integration. Yet, implicit in the very concept of ghetto imperatives of American development is that one of the economic and social policy is to make the ghetto - home for some twenty million Americans - a viable social system and economic living environment. Hence, ghetto s a t i s f y i n g development can be seen as part of the general strategy and imperative of making the urban inner city environment livable and satisfying. 9 Many substantive, issues also center around the strategies for implementing development. They extend ideological spectrum from separatism to integration and from traditional capitalism to community capitalism, with occasional support for socialist or more radical programs for development and change. (See the outlines in Exhibits I and IV). No extended discussion of the arguments is presented. (See Browne, 1970 and several authors in Haddad and laugh, 1969). the there Although the severity of underdevelopment in the ghettos inhabited principally by native Americans, Chicanos and Puerto Ricans warrant more extended analysis than is reflected in the coverage literature, Development from the perspective of these ghettos is only beginning to attract the energies and concerns of analysts and commentators. The physical, social and economic isolation of these ghettos is compounded by considerably more complex language and cultural barriers than exist for black ghettos. is nevertheless a dearth of 50 The Review of Black Political Economy Moreover, the human toll of underdevelopment is also more crippling and tragic as reflected in the data on alienation, mortality, social disorganization and waste of manpower resources. With reference to Indian reservations as ghettos, there is also a unique feature in some instances of having natural resources which can provide a basis for development planning.

  Ghetto Economic Development: Content and Character of the Literature · 1971 · DOI

• 35 Here it is suggested that additional choices that are not now available but that would give upper and upper middle income groups the ability to live in or near the center city at relatively high densities should be explored.

  Elitism and Settlement Patterns in the Latin American City · 1970 · DOI

• The result for 1950 is misleading and perhaps even spurious, resulting from the exclusion (for lack of data) of educational inequality in that regression.

  Human capital and the size distribution of income in Dutch cities · 1970 · DOI

• While in recent years we have learned something about the economic growth process, we obviously know very little about many aspects of the process as it takes place within the urban economy. As a result, we offer only crude and, in many respects, unsatisfactory explanations of differences in the growth performance in different urban economies, and our efforts at scientific forecasting are still in the beginning stage of development. Given the current state of the art, the question of emphasis in future research can be cast best in terms of supply versus demand. Since it has been suggested that our urban supply models are in a primitive state, one might argue that the emphasis should be on supply factors. Such a conclusion, while appealing in some respects, does neglect important questions. Just how important are supply elements in explaining the growth performance of particular urban regions? While we cannot provide firm answers, there are certain aspects of the evolving urban growth process which argue in favor of assigning supply factors a key role. Perhaps fifty to one hundred years ago a demand oriented framework would have been well suited to a study of city growth. Cities then were highly specialized by industry or product. This kind of speciaiization produced a relatively simple economic structure combined with extensive relations with the “rest of the world.” Change was largely a consequence of decisions made by firms with plant facilities already located in the city. These decisions probably hinged primarily, though not 32 entirely, on what was happening to external demands for locally produced goods. Most likely the economic fate of such communities was tied closely to what happened to demand in general and “foreign” trade in particular. Cities now are much larger, more spread out, and more complicated economic structures. An advancing technology has meant the production of a much wider range of goods and services while changes in production processes involve longer sequences of highly specialized capital intensive operations. The result is a large and diversified urban form-the metropolitan area-whose economic fate is much less tied to shifts in the product demand curves of a few industries. Along with diversification, important changes have taken place in the “location matrix,” particularly in the manufacturing sector. In the past there were often unique features at particular sites that largely accounted for the location of certain types of firms. Raw material sources attracted the steel industry to Pittsburgh.

  Supply oriented urban economic models · 1969 · DOI

• This program was limited in its scope, but, as the only government-sponsored new towns program in the United States, it should be studied in the development of a more modern new towns program. Secondly, and per- haps even more importantly, some possibly relevant variables were incorporated only indirectly or, because of lack of data, were omitted altogether.

  Effects of Public Investments on Urban Land Values · 1966 · DOI

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