Masa Fujita is a quiet economist – articulate and funny in person, but never one for dramatic gestures or flashy presentations. His work and influence over the years have built gradually, without at first attracting widespread notice beyond urban economists. But over time he, more than anyone else, has transformed the field.

If there is an overarching theme in Masa's work, it is “escape from von Thiinen.” Let me explain.

The von Thünen model of land use and land rent has, justifiably, exerted a powerful influence on how economists think about location, especially within cities. The basic idea is that of a single urban center, with costly transportation of goods to that center; given varying costs of transportation, this leads to a predictable relationship between land rents, land use, and distance from the center. Once Alonso realized that the same basic framework could be applied to commuting to a city center rather than transporting goods to a central city, we had a ready-made way to think about urban structure – and this way of thinking remains useful to this day.

There is a general presumption in urban economics that average commuting costs are increasing in city size. By analogy, it might be supposed that other spatial costs, such as distribution costs for utility services or access costs to schools and hospitals, will have the same characteristic. However, the basic commuting result derives from an urban model in which population density is uniform out to the city boundary and commuters travel individually and radially to the central business district. It is more realistic to suppose that population density declines away from the centre, as in the standard monocentric urban model and that there are likely to be scale economies in both commuting (e.g. from use of buses or metros) and distribution (e.g. larger diameter water mains). The aim of this paper is to explore the implications of such factors for spatial costs, using data on water distribution costs for 35 “urban districts” in the supply area of one of the water companies in England & Wales. Distribution cost elasticities are quantified for two contrasting urban development scenarios, confirming that in the case of Suburbanization average distribution costs are increasing in city size, as generally assumed; however, in the case of Densification these costs are decreasing in city size. The interaction with water production costs is also considered, showing that, in the case of Densification, scale economies in production are reinforced by density economies in distribution, whereas in the case of Suburbanisation they are offset to a greater or lesser extent by diseconomies in distribution, i.e. higher spatial costs. A final section relates these findings to the literature on commuting costs, urban agglomeration and sprawl. It is concluded that high density settlement has the potential to reduce average costs in distribution (including commuting) as well as production, so that both favour agglomeration. Accordingly, urban modelers should be cautious about assuming that commuting (and other spatial costs) are always increasing in city size.

We study a spatial competition model which is a variant of the celebrated Hotelling (1929) framework. One of the firm is a brick-and-mortar one while the other is on-line. Both firms sell the same product except that (constant) marginal costs may differ. Consumers going to the shop around the corner face transportation costs according to their adress whereas on-line consumers bear a fix cost that may capture technological burden and risk premium. In the pricing Nash equilibria the “new economy” firm has smaller market shares eventhough it offers more attractive prices. For the on-line firm to become a leader, the cost difference must be large enough to offset the comparative disadvantage it face on the demand side. In the long run, increasing competition ultimately forces the local firm out of downtown. We argue that this effect may be related to some of the forecasts concerning the geographical impact of the development of remote access services.

This article contributes to the small literature on the relationship between the range of local public services and population size. Using new data on French local jurisdictions, we test the hypothesis that larger jurisdictions provide a broader range of public goods (the so-called “zoo effect”, Oates (1988)). We take advantage of the fact that, in France, many municipalities recently joined together, forming groups of municipalities (or communities) in order to achieve economies of scale. Using spatial econometrics, we find some evidence for the existence of a zoo effect in French communities. In other terms, larger communities provide a broader range of services than smaller ones. The intensity of the zoo effect is higher in urban than in rural areas.

We propose a method to compute an equilibrium solution for the monocentric city model with traffic congestion, and to quantify the impact of cordon tolls on social surplus. The focus of this paper is on the comparison of road pricing of one and two cordons, with the no toll and first-best situations as benchmarks.

We find that a one-cordon toll yields a social efficiency of 63% with respect to first-best, and that an optimal two-cordon toll increases the efficiency to 73%. Both policies have a positive impact on C02 emissions because they reduce the average length of trips and reduce the road size.

Curbing greenhouse gases emissions from transport in cities is a major challenge for climate policies. The pioneering works of Newman and Kenworthy suggest that many of these emissions could be avoidable, since they result from city densities and the share of road traffic in urban transport. However, implementing a change raises difficult questions. The respective roles of transport and land use policies are controversial. There is an intense debate about priorities between proponents of vehicle efficiency improvements, advocates of abrupt changes in mobility behaviours, and heralds of public transport.

In Europe, the sustainable city is generally seen as the inversion of the urban sprawl process, coupled with the densification of inner suburbs thanks to new public transport infrastructure. Our analysis provides an argument in favour of this scenario, by noting that cost-benefit assessments of these projects should take into account the benefits of induced changes in urban densities, even for marginal extensions.

But all factors impacting urban sprawl must also be properly valued. A stylised example of the model shows that the view a single pre-determined type of post-carbon city is thus far too simplistic.

This paper provides a bird-eye overview of the history of spatial economic theory. It is organized around three main ideas (and authors): (i) land use and urban economics (Thünen), (ii) the nature of competition across space (Hotelling), and (iii) new economic geography and the emergence of economic agglomerations (Krugman).