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Feeding the Cities and GHG Emissions: Beyond the Food Miles Approach
Abstract
In this paper, we study the impact of urbanization on the location of agricultural production and the GHG emissions related to transportation. We develop an economic geography model where the location of agricultural activities and urban population are endogenous. We show that increasing yields induce the spatial concentration of agricultural production in the most urban-crowded region if collection costs are relatively low and in the smallest one otherwise. In addition, we find that inter-regional trade in agricultural commodities may be desirable to reduce GHG emissions, except when urban population is equally split between cities. Finally, we highlight that the market may induce an excess of agricultural agglomeration when yields are high and/or collection costs are low.
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We consider an economic geography model of a new genre: All firms and workers are mobile and their agglomeration within a city generates costs through competition on a housing market. In the case of two sectors, contrasted patterns arise. When one good is perfectly mobile, the corresponding industry is partially dispersed whereas the other is agglomerated, thus showing regional specialization. When one sector supplies a nontradeable consumption good, this sector is more agglomerated than the other. The corresponding equilibrium involves an urban hierarchy in that a larger array of varieties of the two goods is produced within the same city.
ABSTRACT We investigate whether an aging population may challenge the supremacy of large working cities. To this end, we develop an economic geography model with two types of individuals (workers and retirees) and two sectors (local services and manufacturing). Workers produce and consume; the elderly consume only. As a result, the mobility decision of workers is driven by both the wage gap and the cost-of-living gap, unlike the elderly who react to the differences in the cost of living only. We show that the return of pre-industrial urban system dominated by rentier cities does not seem to be on the agenda. Quite the opposite, the future of large working cities is still bright, the reason being that today's urban costs act as a strong force that prevents a large share of local services and manufacturing firms from following the rentiers in the elderly cities, while the supply of differentiated b2c services impede their complete separation.
To address some of the uncertainties inherent in large-scale models, two very different urban models, an advanced travel demand model and an integrated land use and transportation model, are applied to evaluate land use, transit, and auto pricing policies in the Sacramento, CA (US), region. The empirical and modeling literature is reviewed to identify effective land use, transit, and pricing policies and optimal combinations of those policies and to provide a comparative context for the results of the simulation. The study illustrates several advantages of this approach for addressing uncertainty in large-scale models. First, as Alonso [Predicting the best with imperfect data, AIP Journal (1968)] asserts, the intersection of two uncertain models produces more robust results than one grand model. Second, the process of operationalizing policy sets exemplifies the theoretical and structural differences in the models. Third, a comparison of the results from multiple models illustrates the implications of the respective models' strengths and weaknesses and may provide some insights into heuristic policy strategies. Some of the key findings in this study are (1) land use and transit policies may reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and emissions by about 5–7%, and the addition of modest auto pricing policies may increase the reduction by about 4–6% compared to a future Base Case scenario for a 20-year time horizon; (2) development taxes and land subsidy policies may not be sufficient to generate effective transit-oriented land uses without strict growth controls elsewhere in the region; and (3) parking pricing should not be imposed in areas served by light rail lines and in areas in which increased densities are promoted with land subsidy policies.