> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://laurence-wilse-samson.gitbook.io/textbooks/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://laurence-wilse-samson.gitbook.io/textbooks/city-economics/readme.md). # Introduction **By Laurence Wilse-Samson** © 2026 Laurence Wilse-Samson. All rights reserved. > **Full draft, last updated November 2026.** One of 22 textbooks freely readable online ([all books](https://lwilsesamson.com/textbooks/)), all written with AI assistance. Corrections are welcome at . *** More than half of the world's population now lives in urban areas, and that share will reach 68 percent by 2050. Cities generate over 80 percent of global GDP, drive innovation, and shape the opportunities available to billions of people. This book is about how cities work, economically, socially and politically. It is an introduction to urban economics that combines economic analysis with attention to history, policy, and the lived experience of urban life. It is written for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and practitioners who want to understand the forces shaping cities and the policy tools available to improve them. ## What This Book Covers ### Part I: Foundations Part I starts with the basic question: **Why do cities exist?** Despite high costs of living and congestion, people cluster together because proximity creates value through labor market pooling, knowledge spillovers, and access to specialized goods and services. It then turns to **how cities change**: the forces of creative destruction, technological disruption, and policy intervention that reshape urban economies over time. ### Part II: Core Policy Domains Part II covers the markets at the center of urban life. **Housing markets** determine who can afford to live where, which matters for opportunity and inequality. **Transportation systems** shape urban form and access to jobs, education, and amenities. The two markets interact, and policy has to deal with both at once. ### Part III: Global and Cultural Dimensions Urban economics developed largely from the experience of Western cities, but most urban growth now occurs in the developing world. Part III examines **urbanization in Africa, Asia, and Latin America**, where different institutional contexts produce different challenges. It also covers **culture, amenities, and quality of life**, the consumption side of cities, which increasingly drives location decisions. ### Part IV: Contemporary Challenges Part IV covers **climate change** (both mitigation and adaptation) and **technological disruption** (platform economies, remote work, smart cities). These chapters examine how cities can use technology while managing its risks, and how urban form itself affects emissions and adaptation. ### Part V: Governance and the Future Part V examines **urban public finance** (how cities raise and spend money) and looks toward **the future of cities** in an era of demographic change, technological transformation, and climate adaptation. ## Approach and Perspective The approach is **policy-oriented**. The book is grounded in economic theory but emphasizes empirical evidence and real-world applications. Each chapter includes data visualizations based on actual urban data, case studies of specific cities and policies, and discussion of policy trade-offs. Urban economics involves real **trade-offs**: between efficiency and equity, growth and sustainability, innovation and stability. I present the competing views and say where the evidence is uncertain. **Cities are places where people live, work, and build communities**, as well as economic machines. Economic analysis is necessary but not sufficient; understanding cities also requires attention to history, politics, culture, and the aspirations of urban residents. ## Geographic Scope While this book draws on examples and research from cities around the world, its primary empirical focus is on **American cities**. The datasets, policy institutions, and case studies featured most prominently (Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis data, zoning law, property taxation, municipal governance) reflect the U.S. context. The reason is that the U.S. has the largest body of urban economic research and is the institutional setting I know best, not that American cities matter more. That said, the economic frameworks presented here (agglomeration theory, spatial equilibrium, the monocentric city model, the Tiebout model) are general. They apply to Lagos and London as much as to Los Angeles. **Chapter 5** is about cities in the developing world, and comparative examples from Vienna, Tokyo, Singapore, Barcelona, and elsewhere appear throughout. Readers outside the United States should find the theoretical tools fully portable, even where the institutional details differ. ## Companion Volume This book analyzes cities from the inside: how urban markets, institutions, and policies shape the lives of residents within metropolitan areas. For readers interested in how cities connect to regional trade networks, international institutions, and global value chains, the companion volume *Regional Economics* extends the analysis from the metropolitan to the continental and global scale. Where this book asks why housing is expensive in San Francisco or how Lagos can finance its infrastructure, the companion asks why semiconductor fabrication concentrates in a handful of East Asian nodes, why the EU's Cohesion Funds succeeded in some regions and failed in others, and how climate change is redrawing the map of regional economic advantage. The two volumes share theoretical foundations (agglomeration theory, spatial equilibrium, the New Economic Geography) but apply them at complementary scales. Chapter 5 of this book (Cities in the Rest of the World) connects most directly to the companion's treatment of urbanization without industrialization in Africa (Chapter 13) and the institutional frameworks that distinguish productive from unproductive density. *** ## How to Use This Book Each chapter is fairly self-contained, though later chapters build on earlier ones. Readers can proceed sequentially or jump to topics of particular interest. The figures carry part of the argument, so read them with the text. A bibliography lists the key references for each chapter. *** ## About the author I am an economist in New York. I am Associate Director at Oxford Economics, I teach as an adjunct at NYU Wagner and Columbia SIPA, and I am a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Johannesburg's Centre for Competition, Regulation and Economic Development. I took my PhD in economics at Columbia. More at [lwilsesamson.com](https://lwilsesamson.com/). ## How this book was made I wrote this book with substantial help from AI language models, principally Claude (Anthropic), which I used for drafting, editing, structuring arguments and data-visualization code (R), and consistency checking. The outline, the argument, the selection of material and the judgments throughout are mine, as is the responsibility for what remains wrong. Figures were generated from code using the sources identified in their captions; illustrative figures are labelled. Code and other materials may be provided on request. In October 2026 I revised the whole text in two further passes, also with AI help: one to remove the stock phrasing that AI drafts produce, and one to bring the prose closer to my own academic writing. In November 2026 I had the key checkable claims in each chapter (196 in all) compared with a primary source: populations, prices and budgets, what named studies find, and dates of laws, cases and policies. Each was verified, corrected, softened or cut, except 68 for which no primary source could be reached and which are marked as such. This is not a line-by-line proofread, so please check numbers and quotations against the primary sources before citing them. Please report errors to . Corrections usually go live the same day. *Last updated: November 2026*