Assessing the effectiveness of economic instruments to steer urban sprawl: a hedonic pricing simulation modelling approach

• Autor(a) principal: Mendonça, Rita Meireles
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/24057
• topic: Hedonic pricing simulation model; Land tax; Property tax; Public transport subsidy; Urban sprawl

Over the past centuries, cities have undergone through major transformations that led to global urbanization. One of the phenomena emerging from urbanization is the uncontrolled spread of cities into undeveloped areas – i.e. urban sprawl. The decrease in housing and commuting costs as well as the failure to internalize the real costs of natural land, encouraged households to move to the urban fringe – resulting in fragmented, low-density urban development patterns with multiple negative impacts associated. Awareness of this problem encouraged the identification and assessment of policies against urban sprawl, including institutional approaches, command and control instruments, and economic incentive instruments. However, institutional approaches and command and control instruments have been proved inefficient in steering urban sprawl and there are only few studies that assess the effectiveness of economic inventive instruments. Hence, the objective of this study is to assess the effectiveness of economic incentive instruments that aim to enhance urban sustainability as well as contain urban sprawl and associated negative impacts. To this end, the Sustainable Urbanizing Landscape Development (SULD) model is used to assess the effectiveness of a property tax (flat and linear), a land tax (flat and linear) and a public transport subsidy (provided to low income households and to both low and middle income households). A case study is provided for the City of Aveiro in Central Portugal. Results show that a property tax leads to the contraction of the city, a land tax to no alterations and even some expansion, and a public transport subsidy to the contraction of the city. Overall, the property tax (flat 10% and linearly increasing 5%-10%) and the public transport subsidy (for low and middle income households) are the most effective instruments while, on the other hand, the land tax is the least effective instrument to control urban sprawl.