Urban Economics

by Arthur O'Sullivan

Book Overview

Bringing urban issues into a modern microeconomic framework, this work uses basic economic analysis to explain why cities exist, where they develop, how they grow and how various activities are... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0072487844
• ISBN13: 9780072487848
• Release Date: May 2002
• Publisher: Irwin/McGraw-Hill
• Length: 624 Pages
• Weight: 2.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 7.3" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Great textbook

The class was very interesting, but more importantly, the book offered an updated view on local government, education, crime and other topics. Everything was pretty well put into perspective. It doesn't have a lot of drawingsl It does have a lot of graphs, but is what you expect from an economics book.

So cheap So exact same book as newer edition.

I must have majored in economics, since I found a way to minimize my input cost without diminishing returns. I will add that the newer editions have different (more) end of chapter questions. I managed an A with this book, but make sure your assignments aren't directly out of this sucker. Live long mono-centric city models, bid-rent curves, and good info about the ills of modern mass transit systems. I read from this book often to win arguments about city structuring. 60% of the time, it works every time.

Surprised.

I enrolled in an Urban Economics course as part of my minor. I really don't find the basics of economics too terribly thrilling, but I've really enjoyed the content. My professor follows the book closely and the text is surprisingly easy to read. :)

5 stars relative to others

It's not the perfect textbook for the subject, but it is good enough that I still use it in my class. I gave five stars to the 5th edition. The new edition has less material and it is organized in a more integrated way, which for some could be better, but I prefer to teach in a more focused way (with each chapter focusing on one issue). Thus, because there is less material and the new organization, I would give 4 stars to the 6th edition. The book is still very comprehensive, although there are topics that could be better explored (either simplified or extended) and in some cases more accurately according to the current standard urban economics. It has a very good survey of empirical evidence (actually the best feature of the book), but they lack details on the evidence and on the limitations of the studies. Finally, the examples in the text and in the end-of-chapters are poor (not realistic, not creative, and not well adjusted to the material in the book). There are no questions to test knowledge, just understanding (however, these questions are not very clear or smart).

A very comprehensive overview

I had "Urban Economics" for one of my urban planning courses at graduate school. It was a pleasure to study the principles and processes of city building, growth and dynamics, through this book. Every chapter in the book can be a title for a separate volume. So this is a very comprehensive overall general view of economics as a determinant of urban development and form. I particularly liked the chapters on Urban Poverty and Housing. The chapter on poverty explains issues like income transfers, food stamps and their effect on consumer behavior, problems of inner cities and development policies needed to change that.Housing has a great chapter devoted to the peculiarities of housing as a commodity and the effect of race and discrimination on housing patterns. The most interesting part concerns the "filtering" of housing from the upper income to lower income populations.Also explained is the auto oriented transportation vs mass transit and their specific roles in shaping cities.Highly recommended. Easy to read and understand.