Dani Broitman

• PhD
• Associate Professor at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology

Urban systems’ dynamics are the result of two intertwined processes that operate at different rhythms: their physical structure and underlying social processes. This paper suggests a novel approach to the spatial analysis of urban systems, using neighborhoods as a basic building block. Neighborhoods are usually the minimal homogeneous geographical...

Urban greening interventions are intended to improve citizens’ quality of life but often lead to increasing the value of real estate assets, excluding vulnerable residents, and attracting wealthier dwellers. We refer to this process as “active ecological gentrification”. The Covid-19 pandemic and its associated lockdowns and social distancing measu...

What is the definition of a “liveable city”? Although the concept is not new and plenty of particular descriptions of liveable cities exist, a baseline and widely agreed-upon definition is still elusive. In addition, the recent introduction of the “big-data” era opened a plethora of exciting research avenues that, sometimes, seem to be only loosely...

Questionnaires are among the most basic and widespread tools to assess the mental health of a population in epidemiological and public health studies. Their most obvious advantage (firsthand self-report) is also the source of their main problems: the raw data requires interpretation, and are a snapshot of the specific sample’s status at a given tim...

The ability of cities to recuperate from disturbances and return to their evolutionary pathways depends, first and foremost, on the type of damage that the shock created. But in addition, it depends on how information is transmitted in the urban system and on how noise filters distort the information that reaches economic agents. So long as the tra...

Unlabelled: The physical structure of cities is the result of self-organization processes in which profit-maximizing developers are key players. The recent Covid-19 pandemic was a natural experiment by means of which it is possible to gain insights into shifts in the spatial structure of cities by studying developers' behavior. Behavioral changes...

Urban areas can be conceptualized as large and ever-changing playgrounds in which many diverse agents (households, businesses, developers, municipalities, etc.) are active. The interactions between the playground qualities and the players' preferences are not unidirectional. However, sometimes, external events may change the perception of the playg...

Spatial planning defines objectives for spatial ordering of a region, together with instruments required to realize them. However, since the future is uncertain, many factors involved in spatial planning are unknown in advance. Scenario-based forecasting is a common way to deal with this fundamental uncertainty. This prospective approach offers gui...

In this paper, we present results of a land-use forecasting model that we calibrated with vast geo-referenced data of a major metropolitan area. Each land parcel includes information concerning regulations indicating permitted land-uses as well as the certain characteristics of existing buildings. Data concerning all real estate transactions includ...

Urban scholars have made great advances to understand the reciprocal relations between households and their immediate environments as a means for the creation of efficient urban administrative systems. However, from an urban management perspective, reliance on geographical areas fixed for long periods of time as basic data collection constitutes a...

As infrastructure systems become more interconnected and interdependent, the function of one system influences the function of other related systems, which increases their vulnerability to cascading failures. Therefore, quantifying systems’ interdependence is important for assessing their performance. This study aims to enhance current methods, whi...

Economic disparities among cities and regions persist and in some cases are increasing. To promote development of lagging economies, extant policies focus on the lagging regions and attempt to create conditions that are attractive to the immigration of capital, labor and above all knowledge. We study a variety of policies in the context of self-org...

The structure of modern cities is characterized by the uneven spatial distribution of people and activities. Contrary to economic theory, it is neither evenly distributed nor entirely monocentric. The observed reality is the result of various feedbacks in the context of the interactions of attraction and repulsion. Heretofore, there is no agreement...

Ecosystem services are defined as benefits obtained by humans from ecosystem functions and processes. Although the different types of ecosystem services are well defined, their measurement and quantification has remained controversial despite long last research efforts. A particularly elusive and often neglected aspect of ecosystem services quantif...

In this article we explore the claim that spatial interactions among cities are significant drivers of their growth. We assert that reallocation of ideas among cities is a source of improved allocation of resources. We propose a closed economy, agent-based model that is in constant flux. It is populated by autonomous agents that compete and adjust...

Planning delay time is a ubiquitous but under-researched land use regulation method. The aim of this study is to link planning delay time with the loss of urban locally provided ecosystem services (ULPES) caused by land development. Our main hypothesis is that the planning delay is an informal tool that ensures social welfare in a given urban area...

The coexistence of different land uses in peri-urban areas is a well-known planning and managerial challenge, but explicit analyses of the boundaries and interfaces between different land uses are lacking. This paper suggests a method to explicitly quantify the spatial extent of the interfaces between different land uses. The analysis is carried ou...

We present a comprehensive agent-based model of a closed system of cities. The model includes two types of agents—employees and firms. Firms compete for workers and make decisions concerning what to produce and whether to adopt innovations. Individual employees make migration decisions. Some migrants become intrapreneurs when their employers adopt...

Een belangrijk deel van de woningbouwproductie sinds 2000 is gerealiseerd binnen bestaand stedelijk gebied. En binnen die gebieden blijken de stedelijke centra populaire locaties voor nieuwe woningeenheden. Een gedetailleerde analyse van lokale veranderingen in de 15 grootste historische steden in Nederland laat zien dat woningdichtheden en – in mi...

Epidemiological studies often focus on risk assessments associated with exposures to specific air pollutants or proximity to different air pollution sources. Although this information is essential for devising informed health policies, it is not always helpful when it comes to the estimation of potential health effects associated with the introduct...

Urban growth is typically considered a process of expansion. As population grows and transport costs decrease urban density gradients are expected to gradually flatten. This is a basic feature of cities, explained by urban economic models and empirically supported by a plethora of studies about urban density development from all over the world. How...

The characteristics of decision-makers are generally not included in models of environmental-economic conflicts. These models can be classified in two classes according to their goal: Multi Objective models include several conflicting objective functions that should be optimized simultaneously, and Game Theory models that result in a single solutio...

Proximity to nature is highly valued by urbanites, who demonstrate higher willingness to pay for housing at locations near open and green spaces. However, nature in cities can generate negative externalities as well. In this article, we illustrate the complex relationship between cities and nature and suggest that their balance is time and location...

The world is continuing to urbanize. As a result, most of the interactions between humans and nature take place in cities. These interactions are varied and complex. But, contrary to past conception, urbanites do not decimate nature in cities and it continues to thrive. The rich urban biodiversity includes both endemic and cultured species. People...

In this short paper we suggest that analyses carried out at a crude spatial resolution and by means of simple dynamics are misleading. There is a need to take into account various feedbacks and vague boundaries of cities, towns and villages. Analyses at a fine spatial resolution suggest a great variety of possible future evolutions of rural areas....

Setting up a sustainable agricultural vegetative waste-management system is a challenging investment task, particularly when markets for output products of waste-treatment technologies are not well established. We conduct an economic analysis of possible investments in treatment technologies of agricultural vegetative waste, while accounting for fl...

This chapter explores the potential of geospatial analysis to characterize land use dynamics in urban areas and the surrounding urban fringe. It focuses on the difference between policy ambitions and reality with respect to urban densification. Policy ambitions for the containment of urban development are ambitious in the Netherlands, as is evident...

The spatial distribution of vegetative agricultural residuals (VAR) implies that any waste treatment system (WTS) designed to manage VAR is particularly sensitive to transportation costs. Additionally, a wide range of treatment technologies is potentially available for VAR treatment, but some of them lack a well-developed market for their output pr...

Urban economic models predict that as transport costs decrease and population grows monocentric cities are expected to spread around their territory and their density profiles will flatten gradually. This prediction is empirically supported by a plethora of studies about urban densities development form all over the world. There are examples of exc...

p> Purpose: Proximity to nature is highly valued by urbanites. They demonstrate higher willingness to pay for housing at locations near open and green spaces. But, nature in cities can generate negative externalities as well. The aim of this paper is to present the complex relationship between nature and cities and the possible negative influence o...

The spatial distribution of vegetative agricultural residuals makes the economic feasibility of waste treatment solution particularly sensitive to transportation costs. The research evaluates the effect of feedstock transport costs on the economic feasibility of vegetative agricultural residuals treatment facilities for a few districts in the area...

Attributeless event point datasets (AEPDs) are datasets composed of discrete events or observations defined by their geographical location only and lacking any other additional attributes. Examples of such datasets include spotted criminal events, road accidents and residential locations of disease patients. A commonly used approach to the analysis...

The great urbanization project that started some 10,000 years ago is approaching its final stages. We focus on the spatial evolution of mature cities and on the possibility that information and communication technology will contribute to a phase transition and a start of a new urban life cycle. In a context of agent-based model that includes hetero...

While an ever-growing percentage of the world's population is urban, the rate at which cities grow is not uniform. The lifetime of individual cities includes periods of fast growth, slow growth and periods of shrinkage. There exists an extensive literature concerned with possible means to manage specific pathologies. It is our view that the design...

Purpose: Proximity to nature is highly valued by urbanites. They demonstrate higher willingness to pay for housing at locations near open and green spaces. But, nature in cities can generate negative externalities as well. The aim of this paper is to present the complex relationship between nature and cities and the possible negative influence of u...

Residential development is a dynamic process, as changes in housing stock vary substantially over space and time. These spatiotemporal dynamics are expected to differ in various hierarchical levels of urban areas. Urban cores, peri-urban areas and predominantly rural areas are likely to experience different housing development processes as the econ...

The development of residential areas over time is a complex process that is characterised by substantial spatial and temporal variation. In essence, residential growth processes lead to two types of development: the construction of new housing units within existing residential areas (densification) or the development of new residential areas on lan...

Urban construction activities are subject to periods of fast expansion followed by periods of slow growth. Some of these expansions are limited in size, while others are huge. Therefore, it is not surprising that equilibrium-oriented classical models of urban spatial structure are hard pressed to explain the formation of modern cities with polycent...

This paper presents a conceptual model of the main drivers of local residential density change, describes their initial implementation in a land-use change model and discusses the first results in the context of flood risk assessment. It aims to shed light on the cost effectiveness of local climate adaptation measures, preparing the ground for futu...

De ambities met betrekking tot stedelijke verdichting liggen hoog in Nederland. Grote percentages extra woningen zouden binnen het bestaande stedelijk gebied gerealiseerd moeten worden. Maar worden deze hoge ambities gehaald? Een ruimtelijke analyse van de verandering in woningvoorraad tussen 2000 en 2008 laat zien dat met name in het drukbevolkte...

In a recent paper Czamanski and Roth (2011 Annals of Regional Science 46 101–118) demonstrated that, because the profitability of construction projects is influenced by variations in the time incidence of costs and revenues, despite declining willingness to pay and land gradients with distance from central business districts, profitability can expe...

As environmental awareness rises, integrated solid waste management (WM) schemes are increasingly being implemented all over the world. The different WM schemes usually address issues such as landfilling restrictions (mainly due to methane emissions and competing land use), packaging directives and compulsory recycling goals. These schemes are, in...

The paper is concerned with the formation of polycentric cities. The model we introduce includes two types of developers and planning authorities. Developers’ characteristics, such as scale of operations, availability of own capital, and time preferences, lead to various decisions concerning the choice of location and development investment. They a...

In a previous paper (Czamanski and Roth in Ann Reg Sci 46(1):101–118, 2011), we demonstrated that spatial variation in characteristic time can lead to leapfrogging and scattered development, especially in times when interest rates are low or negligible.We explained this result by modeling the simple behavior of developers in the context of a single...