Urban Economics & Economic Development
Urban Economics for Real Estate
Why cities concentrate activity and where value moves next — agglomeration and subcentres, planning and value capture, accessibility and infrastructure timing, housing and affordability, and how to turn all of it into advice about one site.
The promise
Explain why a city is shaped as it is, work out where value moves next, and turn that into advice about one specific site.
By the end you can
- Read a city's centres and gradients, and spot where a subcentre is forming
- Measure accessibility properly, and again on committed infrastructure
- Grade infrastructure by stage and work out how much uplift is already priced in
- Price value-capture instruments into a residual, published rate against precedent
- Diagnose a housing market: the four drivers, the rent test, supply elasticity, informality
- Work with proxies in thin markets, and label every estimate honestly
Where this course takes you
This course is part of 2 role tracks, each ending in a professional deliverable.
You'll produce: A highest-and-best-use advisory report for a land plot — market scan, demand logic, recommended uses, phasing, risks, and a fee proposal.
You'll produce: A public-sector strategy note — a site or district brief, the economic rationale, delivery options, and stakeholder considerations.
Curriculum
Why Cities Concentrate Activity
How agglomeration, access, and the bid-rent gradient explain where value forms in a city.
Planning, Zoning and Land Value
How planning rules, permitted use, and density controls create or destroy real estate value.
Transport, Infrastructure and Accessibility
Measuring accessibility properly, what transit premiums actually are, how value responds at announcement, construction and opening, and why utility capacity is now a binding constraint.
Industrial, Logistics and Infrastructure
What drives demand for industrial and logistics space, and when free zones and infrastructure succeed or fail.
Housing Markets and Affordability
What actually determines house prices, how affordability is measured and mismeasured, why supply response differs so much between cities, the informal market, and how to diagnose a housing market from evidence.
Policy-Linked Demand and Public-Sector Work
How government strategy drives real estate demand, and how to forecast and advise authorities.
Applying Urban Economics to a Decision
Turning the framework into site-level advice, working with proxies where data is thin, avoiding the errors that recur in urban analysis, and producing a complete city and site assessment.
Course assessment
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