Lorena Fonseca, Gervasio Santos (p), Vinícius Mendes

The objective of the paper is to estimate the effect of climatic variations on urbanization in the Brazilian Northeast region. The urbanization process in Brazil has been accelerating since the beginning of the second half of the 20th century. The country has about 85% of the population living in urban areas. In this context, the process of urbanization in the Northeast region needs to be better analyzed, based on the respective regional heterogeneities. The Northeast region is marked by the popular sense that climate vulnerability is responsible for its precarious development, and attributing to the semiarid the main locus of the region's social backwardness. The international empirical literature shows that climatic variables and extreme climatic events exert important influences on a variety of economic results with different consequences. These results are conditioned by socioeconomic, political and institutional features in each place.
Urban areas work as a way for people to escape from adverse climatic effects as agricultural productivity was compromised. In municipalities market by presence of industrial units urban areas would be able to offer employment alternatives. This hypothesis is consistent considering that the industrial areas have always been attractive in terms of employment opportunities and drivers of urbanization. Thus, an empirical study was conducted to test econometrically whether the precipitation climatic variable has effects on urbanization in the Northeast region and the semi-arid region of Brazil, in particular. In addition, the paper also verified whether the expressive presence of industrial activity can mitigate the effects of climatic conditions, through intra-municipal migration. The results indicated that in municipalities that have an expressive industrial presence, a reduction of precipitation increases urbanization when compared to other municipalities. However, no statistically significant results were found in the estimates for the semi-arid region.

Dani Broitman (p), Erez Buda

A residence can be conceptualized as a composite commodity, comprising two main components: Land and structure. While the structure includes all the physical and building characteristics of a given residence, the land component represents the attractiveness of its specific location site. As such, the value attributed to the land expresses the economic value of the residence's location, regardless the type structure built on it. The traditional approach to assess land value assumes that this value is the difference between the market price of the residence and its construction cost. Although this method is accurate for specific real estate properties, it cannot be used for large scale regional assessment. Even if market prices are available, construction costs are difficult to calculate given the great variation of built structures even in small geographical areas. This paper focus on built land values in Israeli urban areas, both at the local and the interurban levels, using an alternative approach. Residential built land values are assessed exploiting a hedonic model based on residential real estate transactions. The calculation is performed at two different time periods, shedding light on the dynamics of the gap between central urban areas and the geographical periphery in Israel over time using built land value as an objective variable.

Andrea Caragliu (p), Roberta Capello , Michiel Gerritse

Central Place Theory (CPT) suggests that urban functions change along with their average size. Yet most empirical descriptions of the development of the urban landscape rely on measures of city size, assuming homogeneity of rank-specific economic activities. In this paper, we assume that different functions of cities may contribute unevenly to the long-run development of the city; and in particular that the most complex tasks have the strongest impact in the largest cities.
Theoretically, the number of intertemporal changes across the urban hierarchy distribution is expected to be relatively limited: it takes time for cities to adjust structural features such as the presence of high-level functions (Allens and Sanglier, 1979; Eeckhout, 2004; Parr, 2017). To address this limit, we use long-run National Statistical Institute (ISTAT) census data (1971-2011) to describe the evolution of Italian system of cities in terms of hierarchy and size.
The development of cities varies strongly with the type of function they specialize in. Specialization in the most complex functions, and in particular in management tasks, was associated with the strongest growth in terms of rank, population and employment. The growth effects of management tasks were particularly strong in large urban areas. By contrast, a specialization in tasks of lower complexity, such as agriculture or low-tech manufacturing turns out to be a better predictor of growth in smaller cities. This suggests that the importance of functional specialization in development is polarized: large city growth is primarily associated to its complex functions, but small city growth is associated to less complex functions.
We also document that the growth effects of complex functional specialization are highly localized. Proximity to a city with large employment in complex production does not explain own city growth. Similarly, we find growth effects of complex specialization in large and medium-sized cities with little access to nearby large cities, but we find no growth effects of complex specialization in smaller cities with large access to nearby large cities. This suggests that functional specialization works in the most central cities but cannot be “borrowed” by suburban or satellite cities.