An extension of Mohring’s model for land rent distribution

In an early paper Herbert Mohring (J. Poi Et on , 49 (1961)) presented a model for land rent distribution yielding the well-known result that the price of land must fall with the distance from the city center to offset transportation costs. Our paper is an extension of Mohring's model in which we relax some of his drastic simplifying assumptions. This extended model has been incorporated in a method for economic evaluation of city master plans which has been applied to a Swedish city. In this method the interdependence among housing, heating, and transportation, the dura-bility of urban structures, and the uncertainty of future demand are explicitly considered within a cost-benefit approach. Some empirical results from this pilot study concerning land rent distributions are also presented here.

Evaluation of school plans

A model is presented for simulation and economic evaluation of school plans within the framework of city master planning. The model has been applied to plans for a Swedish city, Västerȧs, and some illustrative results are reported.

Explanation of changes in real estate stock market

The aim of this study is to explain the changes in the real estate prices as well as in the real estate stock market prices, using some macro-economic explanatory variables, such as the gross domestic product (GDP), the real interest rate and the unemployment rate. Several regressions have been carried out in order to express some types of incremental and absolute deflated real estate lock market indexes in terms of the macro-economic variables. The analyses are applied to the Swedish economy. The period under study is 1984-1994. Time series on monthly data are used. i.e. the number of data-points is 132. If time leads/lags are introduced in the e regressions, significant improvements in the already high correlations are achieved. The signs of the coefficients for IR, UE and GDP are all what one would expect to see from an economic point of view: those for GDP are all positive, those for both IR and UE are negative. All the regressions have high R2 values. Both markets anticipate change in the unemployment rate by 6 to 9 months, which seems reasonable because such change can be forecast quite reliably. But, on the contrary, there is no reason why they should anticipate by 3-6 months changes in the interest rate that can hardly be reliably forecast so far in advance.

The citizens' urban extitutional processes in Madrid

Talking about participation is always taking into account economics, capitals and resources. Who can participate? How citizens can afford time and space resources to participate? We don¿t like to speak about participation rather than collective processes of empowerment. Connecting the personal and the social, a different analysis of the relations between the public sphere and the domestic space is needed. There is an emergent new collective realm based on networks opening and distributing domestic practices within the city. These processes are developed as extitucional informal processes around the house, revealing other forms of urban and citizen assemblages in Madrid. Studies on the urban citizen organization have not developed a system to explain the different modes and processes as a movement-rhizome formed around the housing. It is the purpose of this research to explain and track how they are formed, how they operate in the city, how the action enables trading and how other non econonomical capitals are at stake in this process. The article investigates the different modes in which the creation of citizen networks not come only from public space and squares but also from finantial negociations, banks, housing and bodies. House is not any more an individual, particular and intimate space. That is the main teaching that the Mortage citizens¿ platform show us in Madrid. The empowerment citizen initiative PaH and all the citizen initiatives around the access to housing perform another urbanism as an extitutional process. Madrid is also today a collective laboratory around the house.