From College to the City: Implications of Rail Transit on the Movement of the Young, College Educated Into the City Center

This chapter focuses on how investment in the American rail infrastructure has shaped changes in the population and residential patterns. Specifically, the chapter examines the association between commuter rail systems, urban rail transit systems, and the movement of the college-educated young into the inner city. Two hypotheses are proposed about the characteristics of rail systems and the relationship to the growth in the percentage of young college graduates residing in close-in neighborhoods. Using a sample of central cities within the 51 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S., the chapter compares the growth in young college graduates (ages 25 to 34 years) across cities with the different transit configurations. Using correlation analysis, the chapter explores the relationship between the presence of rail transit and the residential location choices of this population group. In the discussion and conclusion, the findings are summarized and implications for policy and sustainability are discussed

Models of Urban Land Use in Europe

The aim of this paper is to examine available homogenous data on urban conversion of land in Western European countries and determine whether they are suitable to make an international comparison between land policies and management behaviour at the local level. This paper provides some results obtained from currently available information, but it stresses major data production criticalities which hinder the performance of comparable and reliable overall statistical studies. Conclusions stress the need for greater detail in the production of primary data on the features and magnitude of territorial urbanisation in Europe, as the EEA is doing for main cities. Moreover, this paper includes some remarks on the contents of the preliminary documents of EU soil directive. In particular, it focuses on the issue of urban transformation thresholds over time, a topic that has already been tackled by some northern European countries, however using techniques which cannot be applied as they are to all other countries