ACCESSIBILITY AND SITE RENTS IN THE C-ECONOMY. IN: URBAN AND REGIONAL TRANSPORTATION MODELING. ESSAYS IN HONOR OF DAVID BOYCE

Abstract

This chapter on accessibility and site rents in the C-economy is from a book of essays published in honor of David Boyce for his contributions to the fields of transportation modeling and regional science. The authors note that the C in C-economy stands for several typical features of the post-industrial economy, such as creative, cognitive and computer capacities, culture, and communications. Using Sweden as an example, the authors discuss decision making strategies and approaches; the regional accumulation of capital (knowledge, in this case); real estate returns, regional rates of growth, and accessibility to knowledge; optimizing the real estate portfolio; and the intra-metropolitan property rent structure. The authors conclude that using a simplified growth model one can demonstrate that a knowledge-oriented economy, consisting of a given number of regions with different accessibilities, can grow at a balanced rate; this growth can feature increasing amounts of knowledge capital per unit of land and labor as well as increasing per capita incomes. Their analysis shows that even in the C-economy, real estate businesses would gain from diversifying their investment portfolios interregionally, combining the higher growth rates of C-regions with the greater stability of more traditional but accessible regions.