Second Tier Cities

Second Tier Cities
Author: Ann R. Markusen
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 470
Release: 1999
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780816633739

Over the past thirty years, transnational investment, trade, and government policies have encouraged the decentralization of national economies, disrupting traditional patterns of urban and regional growth. Many smaller cities -- such as Seattle, Washington; Campinas, Brazil; Oita, Japan; and Kumi, Korea -- have grown markedly faster than the largest metropolises. Dubbed here "second tier cities, " they are home to specialized industrial complexes that have taken root, provided significant job growth, and attracted mobile capital and labor. The culmination of an ambitious five-year, fourteen-city research project conducted by an international team of economics and geographers, Second Tier Cities examines the potential of these new regions to balance uneven regional development, create good, stable jobs, and moderate hyper-urbanization. Comparing across national borders, the contributors describe four types of second tier cities: Marshallian industrial districts, hub-and-spoke cities, satellite platforms, and government-anchored complexes. They find that both industrial and regional policies have been important contributors to the rise of second tier cities, though the former often trump the latter. Lessons for local, national, and international policymakers are drawn. The authors are critical of devolution and argue that it must be accompanied by strong labor and environmental standards and mechanisms to overcome differential regional resource endowments.

24-Hour Cities

24-Hour Cities
Author: Hugh F. Kelly
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2016-07-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1317618319

Winner of the Gold Award in the Tenth Annual Robert Bruss Real Estate Book Competition 24 Hour Cities is the very first full length book about America’s cities that never sleep. Over the last fifty years, the nation’s top live-work-play cities have proven themselves more than just vibrant urban environments for the elite. They are attracting a cross-section of the population from across the U.S. and are preferred destinations for immigrants of all income strata. This is creating a virtuous circle wherein economic growth enhances property values, stronger real estate markets sustain more reliable tax bases, and solid municipal revenues pay for better services that further attract businesses and talented individuals. Yet, just a generation ago, cities like New York, Boston, Washington, San Francisco, and Miami were broke (financially and physically), scarred by violence, and prime examples of urban dysfunction. How did the turnaround happen? And why are other cities still stuck with the hollow downtowns and sprawling suburbs that make for a 9-to-5 urban configuration? Hugh Kelly’s cross-disciplinary research identifies the ingredients of success, and the recipe that puts them together.

OECD Urban Policy Reviews Enhancing Productivity in UK Core Cities Connecting Local and Regional Growth

OECD Urban Policy Reviews Enhancing Productivity in UK Core Cities Connecting Local and Regional Growth
Author: OECD
Publisher: OECD Publishing
Total Pages: 134
Release: 2020-03-02
Genre:
ISBN: 9264882146

With the right policies and sufficient investment in public transport, housing, skills and other key policy areas, Core Cities could become centres of economic activity that pull their regions and the entire UK to higher productivity levels. This report unpacks the productivity puzzle in the UK and offers policy recommendations for the local and national level to achieve higher productivity and more inclusive growth.

Beyond the Metropolis

Beyond the Metropolis
Author: Louise Young
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2013-04-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520275209

In Beyond the Metropolis, Louise Young looks at the emergence of urbanism in the interwar period, a global moment when the material and ideological structures that constitute “the city” took their characteristic modern shape. In Japan, as elsewhere, cities became the staging ground for wide ranging social, cultural, economic, and political transformations. The rise of social problems, the formation of a consumer marketplace, the proliferation of streetcars and streetcar suburbs, and the cascade of investments in urban development reinvented the city as both socio-spatial form and set of ideas. Young tells this story through the optic of the provincial city, examining four second-tier cities: Sapporo, Kanazawa, Niigata, and Okayama. As prefectural capitals, these cities constituted centers of their respective regions. All four grew at an enormous rate in the interwar decades, much as the metropolitan giants did. In spite of their commonalities, local conditions meant that policies of national development and the vagaries of the business cycle affected individual cities in diverse ways. As their differences reveal, there is no single master narrative of twentieth century modernization. By engaging urban culture beyond the metropolis, this study shows that Japanese modernity was not made in Tokyo and exported to the provinces, but rather co-constituted through the circulation and exchange of people and ideas throughout the country and beyond.

House Prices: Changing the City World

House Prices: Changing the City World
Author: Pengfei Ni
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 623
Release: 2019-11-20
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9813291117

This report was jointly launched by the National Academy of Economic Strategy of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and UN-HABITAT. Using the indicator system and objective data, the competitiveness of 1,035 global cities was evaluated in detail. The report measures the development pattern of global urban competitiveness as a whole, and the gap between the relevant parties and the ideal state. It has refreshed people's past perceptions of urban rankings and confirmed that the science and technology innovation center cities and central cities of emerging economies have begun to break the inherent global cities and they have entered the ranks of the most urban competitiveness.While paying attention to the comparison of competitiveness among cities, this report further promotes the perspective to the pattern and trend change of global economic and social development from the perspective of city. The followings are new findings: First, information technology has increasingly become the primary driving force for urban development; Second, it is the three meridians that divide the global urban population and economic differentiation; Third, the soft links between cities gradually dominate the global urban system; Fourth, the formation of new global cities is beginning.

Overlooked Cities

Overlooked Cities
Author: Hanna A. Ruszczyk
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2020-12-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000336026

Overlooked Cities reflects and impacts the changing landscape of urban studies and geography from the perspective of smaller and more regional cities in the urban South. It critically examines the ways in which cities are uniquely positioned within different urban and knowledge hierarchies. The book unpacks the dynamics of “overlooked-ness” in these cities, identifies emerging trends and processes that characterise such cities and provides alternative sites for comparative urban theory. It is organised into two themes: firstly, politics and power and secondly, production and negotiation of knowledge. The authors share a commitment to challenging the unevenness of urban knowledge production by approaching these cities on their own terms. Only then can we harness the insights emanating from these overlooked cities, and contribute to a deeper and richer understanding of the urban itself. This collection of essays, focusing on 13 cities in nine countries and across three continents (Luzhou, China; Bharatpur, Nepal; Bloemfontein/Mangaung and Pretoria/Tshwane, South Africa; Zarqa, Jordan; Santa Fe, Argentina; Manizales, Colombia; Arequipa and Trujillo, Peru; Dili, Timor-Leste; Bandar Lampung, Semarang and Bontang, Indonesia) makes a timely contribution to urban scholarship. The volume will be of interest to scholars from the disciplines of urban studies, geography, development and anthropology, as well as postgraduate students researching the global South and third year undergraduate students studying cities and urban studies, development and critical thinking.

2008–2009

2008–2009
Author: Li Yuming
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2014-04-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1614518262

China, with the world's largest population, numerous ethnic groups and vast geographical space, is also rich in languages. Since 2006, China's State Language Commission has been publishing annual reports on what is called "language life" in China. These reports cover language policy and planning invitatives at the national, provincial and local levels, new trends in language use in a variety of social domains, and major events concerning languages in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. Now for the first time, these reports are available in English for anyone interested in Chinese language and linguistics, China's language, education and social policies, as well as everyday language use among the ordinary people in China. The invaluable data contained in these reports provide an essential reference to researchers, professionals, policy makers, and China watchers.

A Tale of Tier 3 Cities

A Tale of Tier 3 Cities
Author: Mr. Kenneth Rogoff
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Total Pages: 58
Release: 2022-09-30
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

This paper provides new estimates of the housing stock, construction rates and price developments by city tier in China in order to understand where imbalances might be concentrated, and the implications of any significant contraction. We also update estimates of the size of China’s rapidly evolving real estate sector through 2021, allowing one to look at the initial impact of COVID-19, as well as extending the analysis to incorporate urban-expansion related infrastructure construction. We argue that China overall faces imbalances between supply and demand for housing stock, but the problem is significantly deeper outside tier 1 cities.

NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2015

NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2015
Author: Martin Eichenbaum
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 517
Release: 2016-06-22
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 022639574X

This year, the NBER Macroeconomics Annual celebrates its thirtieth volume. The first two papers examine China’s macroeconomic development. “Trends and Cycles in China's Macroeconomy” by Chun Chang, Kaiji Chen, Daniel F. Waggoner, and Tao Zha outlines the key characteristics of growth and business cycles in China. “Demystifying the Chinese Housing Boom” by Hanming Fang, Quanlin Gu, Wei Xiong, and Li-An Zhou constructs a new house price index, showing that Chinese house prices have grown by ten percent per year over the past decade. The third paper, “External and Public Debt Crises” by Cristina Arellano, Andrew Atkeson, and Mark Wright, asks why there appear to be large differences across countries and subnational jurisdictions in the effect of rising public debts on economic outcomes. The fourth, “Networks and the Macroeconomy: An Empirical Exploration” by Daron Acemoglu, Ufuk Akcigit, and William Kerr, explains how the network structure of the US economy propagates the effect of gross output productivity shocks across upstream and downstream sectors. The fifth and sixth papers investigate the usefulness of surveys of household’s beliefs for understanding economic phenomena. “Expectations and Investment,” by Nicola Gennaioli, Yueran Ma, and Andrei Shleifer, demonstrates that a chief financial officer's expectations of a firm's future earnings growth is related to both the planned and actual future investment of that firm. “Declining Desire to Work and Downward Trends in Unemployment and Participation” by Regis Barnichon and Andrew Figura shows that an increasing number of prime-age Americans who are not in the labor force report no desire to work and that this decline accelerated during the second half of the 1990s.

Cities and rural transformation: A spatial analysis of rural youth livelihoods in Ghana

Cities and rural transformation: A spatial analysis of rural youth livelihoods in Ghana
Author: Diao, Xinshen
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
Total Pages: 40
Release: 2017-01-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

Urbanization has had a major impact on livelihoods in Ghana and throughout Africa as a whole. However, much research on urbanization has focused on effects occurring within cities, while there is insufficient understanding of its effects on rural areas. This paper examines the impact of urbanization—through a typology of districts—on rural livelihoods in Ghana. The country’s districts are classified into seven spatial groups according to the size of the largest city in each district in southern and northern Ghana. The paper does not address rural–urban migration but instead focuses on the livelihoods of rural households. In contrast to the extensive literature focusing on the effects of urbanization on individuals, we assess its impacts on individual rural households as a whole, with a particular focus on youth-headed households. Many rural households have shifted their primary employment from agriculture to nonagriculture, especially in the more urbanized South. In contrast, change in livelihood diversification within rural households with family members’ primary employment in both agriculture and nonagriculture appears much less rapid. Rural youth-headed households are significantly more associated with the transition away from agriculture than households headed by other adults, and such trends are stronger in locations closer to larger cities, particularly in the South. Although the nonagricultural economy is becoming increasingly important for rural households, contrary to expectations, the probit model analysis in this paper shows that agricultural production does not appear to be more intensified—in terms of modern input use—in the more urbanized South, and youth do not show greater agricultural technology adoption than other adults, indicating that the constraints against modern input adoption may be binding for all farmers, including youth and farmers in more urbanized locations. We also find that rural poverty rates are consistently lower among nonagricultural households, and the share of middle-class population is also disproportionally higher among rural nonagricultural households than agricultural households. While the probit analysis confirms the positive relationship between being a nonagricultural household and being nonpoor or becoming middle class after controlling for all other factors, education seems to play the biggest role. As rural youth become more educated and more households shift from agriculture to the rural nonfarm economy, a different range of technologies for agricultural intensification is necessary for agriculture to be attractive for youth. A territorial approach and related policies that integrate secondary cities and small towns with the rural economy deserve more attention such that the diversification of rural livelihoods can become a viable alternative or complement to rural–urban migration for youth.