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Scope

Urban economies span two primary dimensions: the regional/national/international urban system context within which a city exists, including its local core-hinterland setting, and the internal structure of a city, which differs among regions of the world. Varying definitions of the term city, particularly with regard to data collection, complicate achieving a complete understanding of these two dimensions, whereas massive decades-long rural-to-urban migration reinforcing in situ urbanization increasingly highlights the importance of establishing such an understanding. To date, much urban economic scholarship guidance derived from the following six essential axioms, reflecting a conspicuous geographic component (i.e., an urban economic geography subtitle) for this sub-discipline:
    A1: (non)geographic competition renders price adjustments trending toward locational equilibrium
    A2: localization and urbanization agglomeration economies, and other self-reinforcing geographic effects, generate extreme outcomes
    A3: production is subject to economies of scale together with trade-offs between them and transportation costs
    A4: geographic externalities, a form of spatial spillovers, cause inefficiencies
    A5: geographic competition establishes local monopolies/ologopolies and location rent, trending toward generating zero excess economic profit
    A6: public resources provision achieves a location-allocation equilibrium in which no individual urban inhabitant can be made better off without making at least one other urban inhabitant worse off

Standard conceptual frameworks built upon these axioms frequently support analyses of geographic distributions of urban phenomena by including one of the following three objective functions coupled with transportation/commuting cost constraints: utility maximization, production function (often Cobb-Douglas) maximization, and entropy maximization.

The preceding six axioms reflect von Thünen-inspired Alonso-Muth-Mills type specifications for intra-city, and Christaller/Lösch-inspired central place structures for inter-city, descriptions as workhorse models of a geographically oriented urban economics subdiscipline. However, these conceptualizations need to encompass both innovations and dynamics to become more meaningful in terms of providing real world insights. In doing so, shifting their goals to ones seeking a reduction in damage to urban environments and an eradication of poor quality of urban life situations promotes a sustainable city. Important accompanying urban matters concerning the production, consumption, and transfer of urban wealth include: sufficient household employment and income, social justice, proper and affordable housing, environmentally friendly transportation, human consumption and population levels that avoid urban environmental degradation, and citizen-based governance.

The mission of 'Urban Economics' is to publish results of creative investigations addressing, debating, shaping, and/or advancing this research frontier endeavor that aim to improve the sustainability of cities throughout the world. In particular, this section focuses on, but does not restrict its attention solely to, the following themes:

•    emergence of conurbations

•    expanding and shrinking/declining/abandoned metropolitan areas

•    geographic accuracy/scale/resolution issues for urban data

•    history/historical inertia of a city

•    inter-, intra-, and rural-to-urban neighborhood relocation

•    inter-cities competition

•    journey-to-work/shop/recreate flows

•    localized urban economic development/impacts

•    multilocational retail firm dynamics

•    polycentric cities

•    regional/national/international urban hierarchies

•    spatial econometric/statistical analysis of urban phenomena

•    the Schelling model

•    theoretical foundations of urban economic models

•    updating of classical urban studies

•    urban bid rent curves

•    urban boosterism

•    urban case studies for poorly researched parts of the world

•    urban commuting fields

•    urban cost of living: over time and/or across space

•    urban crime

•    urban disasters/risk assessments

•    urban economic base and input-output tables

•    urban elections and politics

•    urban employment and/or employment subcenters

•    urban environmental pollution

•    urban environmental remediation

•    urban forests and open spaces

•    urban governmental taxes and user fees

•    urban horizontal-vertical land use trade-offs

•    urban housing markets

•    urban industries

•    urban infrastructure

•    urban land uses

•    urban market areas

•    urban networks

•    urban population density

•    urban population growth management

•    urban public education

•    urban public good usage/planning

•    municipal and NGO funding of public health

•    inter- and intra-urban geographic variation in public health provision costs

•    municipal and NGO funding of social justice

•    urban socio-economic/demographic groups

•    urban system power laws

The overall focus of this journal section is on publishing high-quality scientific state-of-the-art original, review and short contribution articles, as well as selected policy briefs and commissioned editorials, at the forefront of sustainable urban economics, especially those multidisciplinary in breadth and embracing a geographic element.

Frontiers in Sustainable Cities is member of the Committee on Publication Ethics.

Facts

  • Short name

    Front. Sustain. Cities

  • Abbreviation

    frsc

  • Electronic ISSN

    2624-9634

  • Indexed in

    Scopus, Google Scholar, DOAJ, CrossRef, Web of Science Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) , CLOCKSS

  • Impact

    2.4 Impact Factor

    4 CiteScore

Submission

Urban Economics welcomes submissions of the following article types: Brief Research Report, Community Case Study, Conceptual Analysis, Correction, Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy, Data Report, Editorial, General Commentary, Hypothesis & Theory, Methods, Mini Review, Opinion, Original Research, Perspective, Policy Brief, Policy and Practice Reviews, Review, Systematic Review.

All manuscripts must be submitted directly to the section Urban Economics, where they are peer-reviewed by the Associate and Review Editors of the specialty section.

Open access statement

Open access logo

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That is why Frontiers provides online free and open access to all of its research publications. For more information on open access click here.

Open access funder and institutional mandates

Frontiers is fully compliant with open access mandates, by publishing its articles under the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC-BY). Funder mandates such as those by the Wellcome Trust (UK), National Institutes of Health (USA) and the Australian Research Council (Australia) are fully compatible with publishing in Frontiers. Authors retain copyright of their work and can deposit their publication in any repository. The work can be freely shared and adapted provided that appropriate credit is given and any changes specified.

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Frontiers uses the single anonymized peer review model, where the reviewer identity is not made visible to the author, while the author identity is visible to the reviewer, and reviewer and the authors’ identities are visible to the decision-making editor. Reviewers interact with the handling editor and the authors. Editor and reviewer names and affiliations are published on all Frontiers articles.

Research must be certified by peers before entering a stream of knowledge that may eventually reach the public - and shape society. Therefore, Frontiers only applies the most rigorous and unbiased reviews, established in the high standards of the Frontiers Review System. Furthermore, only the top certified research, evaluated objectively through quantitative online article level metrics, is disseminated to increasingly wider communities as it gradually climbs the tiers of the Frontiers Tiering System from specialized expert readership towards public understanding.

Frontiers has a number of procedures in place to support and ensure the quality of the research articles that are published:

  • 2023

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