Assorted Links

1. A Research Agenda for Studying Climate Change Adaptation, by M. Kahn (UCLA)
   
   
2. 100 years of census: England & Wales 1911-2011
   
   
3. Several 'celebrations posts' for the 150th anniversary of the London Tube yesterday! My favortites: James Cheshire, David Levinson
   
   
4. Dancing lessons with James Brown ("Funky Chicken" ! wtf)
   
   
5. A piece by The Economist on growth of subway systems worldwide
   
   
6. Call for papers: 2nd international workshop on regional, urban, and spatial economics in China (ht Paulo Rheingantz)
   
   
7. New prize on causality in statstistics education
   
   
8. Cityscape Chicago

Recent Real Estate Trends in China

Abstract:

We provide the first multi-city, constant quality land price index for 35 major markets in China. While there is meaningful heterogeneity in land price growth across cities, on average the last nine years have seen land values skyrocket in many markets, not just those on or near the coast. The typical market has experienced double-digit compound average annual growth in real, constant-quality land values. The 2009-2010 stimulus period typically saw large surges in prices. Three notable characteristics about the land value appreciation series are their strong mean reversion at annual frequencies, the strong common factor in their movement, and their very high volatility. Quantities, not just prices, have been sharply increasing in recent years. The typical amount of space supplied via land auctions in our 35 city sample has doubled since 2008. Some local political economy traits such as the time the local Chinese Communist Party leader has been in office are correlated with land supply volume.

I saw this at Andres Marroquin's blog (it goes to my blog-reading list, by the way)

Related links: 

• China's Housing Market: Is a Bubble About to Burst?
• The Economist interactive overview of global house prices and rents
• JTRG call for papers: Transport and Logistics in China

Famous watchwords in Urban Planning

Some of you might have heard of the Google Books Ngram Viewer. Basically, it's a tool that charts the usage of any word over time in published books (Google books database has over 20 million scanned books).

So this time, I have used it as as a proxy for the popularity of famous watchwords in Urban Planning, such as smart growth, compact city, new urbanism, creative class and world city.

Here is what I've found. You can click on the image to enlarge it or you can click here and try your own combination of words.

[Click on te image to enlarge it]

Perhaps you might ask 'why would someome do that? for what purpose?' the ultimate answer!

You may also play around using google trends, which shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume in google's search engine.

Related Link:

• The rise and fall of Urban Sociology (?)
• The Global Lab Episode 18 . Smart Cities

Urban Picture

Chinese Architecture, Old and New. Awesome pictures! (via Tyler Cowen)

MRU short videos on Migration

Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok (from MR Blog) have a few excellent short videos on Migration as a part of their Development Economics course at the Marginal Revolution University.

This one is about internal migration in China.

Other MRU videos on Migration you should check:

1. Basic Facts about Migration
2. Wage Gains from Immigration
3. Remittances
4. Is there a Brain Drain?
5. Wage Effects in the U.S.
6. Internal Chinese Migration

Isochronic maps of American railways in the 1800s

We have already seen some Isochronic maps here at Urban Demographics Blog. Here are a couple of travel time maps for rail mode in the US using New York City as a starting point (1800, 1830, 1857 and 1930). Via Nathan Yau.

Time to get from New York City to almost anywhere in the US, in 1857.

[Image Credit: the 1932 Atlas of the Historical Geography of the US, via Michael Graham Richard]

Who's afraid of population decline?

A 51-minute talk by Professor David Coleman on the fear of population decline  (slides in PDF). You may also read his paper on the same topic published in PDR - Population and Development Review.

• Related Link (Updated): Russia's Population Decline in Regional Perspective

Chart of the Day

US housing (via The Economist)

Related Links:

1. Is It Better to Buy or Rent? (interactive)
2. UK house prices - as flat as a board
3. Demographic Transition, Economic Crisis and the Housing Deficit in Indonesia
4. The Balance of Affordable Housing in New York City
5. The spatial dynamics of the Hong Kong housing market, 1992–2008
6. A nice debate the merits of homeownership in The Economist
7. The Latin American Cohabitation Boom, 1970–2007

The Prison Population in the US is down

More here.

Quote of the day

"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."

(William Gibson)