Urban Land Economics

Since conventional economic analysis cannot easily be applied to an urban situation, the market is absent for many products, especially those associated with the urban infrastructure. There are many externalities and investment decisions are usually undertaken without reference to the urban structure in general and to external scale economies and diseconomies in particular. It is thus difficult or impossible to allocate resource optimally either within the public sector or between the public and private sectors

Despite the recent interest taken in urban land economics especially in the United States the discipline is in its infancy, and very few universities target urban planners with specially developed courses, this economic model has been audited and validated by the Department of Economics at MIT, one of the few universities making advances on the subject.