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Function Follows Form

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  • Dascher, Kristof

Abstract

Ever since Victor Gruen opened Northland in a Detroit suburb, thousands of shopping centers and office parks have sprung up along city peripheries. While automobile travel is necessary for this transition from the monocentric to the polycentric city, car travel alone, so this paper argues, is not sufficient. Instead, the decentralization of shops and jobs (two important “urban functions”) hinges on the initial spatial distribution of the urban electorate, as embodied by the original city’s shape (“urban form”). The electorate is more likely to tilt in favor of decentralization the less skewed is original city shape. Hence “function follows form”. Given that “form follows function” eventually, too, cities either remain centralized and skewed in the long run, or shed all three: central jobs, central shops, and skew. We turn to a sample of U.S. metropolitan areas to illustrate these ideas.

Suggested Citation

  • Dascher, Kristof, 2019. "Function Follows Form," Journal of Housing Economics, Elsevier, vol. 44(C), pages 131-140.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:jhouse:v:44:y:2019:i:c:p:131-140
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jhe.2018.08.003
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    Cited by:

    1. Alexander Daminger & Kristof Dascher, 2020. "City Skew and Homeowner Subsidy Removal," Working Papers 195, Bavarian Graduate Program in Economics (BGPE).
    2. Alexander Daminger & Kristof Dascher, 2023. "Homeowner Subsidy Repeal and Housing Recentralization," Land Economics, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 99(2), pages 283-301.
    3. Dascher, Kristof, 2020. "City Shapes' Contribution to Why Donald Trump Won," MPRA Paper 99290, University Library of Munich, Germany.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    City form; City functions; Decentralization; Suburbanization; Urban political economy;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • R50 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Regional Government Analysis - - - General
    • D78 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Positive Analysis of Policy Formulation and Implementation
    • R12 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Size and Spatial Distributions of Regional Economic Activity; Interregional Trade (economic geography)

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