The Economic Value of Depth

TL;DR

This paper introduces an economic perspective on spatial depth, proposing a new measure called the d-value to quantify how depth influences value creation in urban spaces, supported by a model and practical application.

Contribution

It presents a novel economic model of a linear city incorporating the d-value, a new syntactic measure for spatial depth, and demonstrates its application in public housing analysis.

Findings

Spaces with a d-value close to one are preferred for economic activities.

The d-value effectively captures the relation between external and internal spatial depth.

The model shows depth can generate local monopolies in less integrated spaces.

Abstract

The main goal of this article is to introduce an economic perspective in the social logic of space. Firstly, we describe the economic model of a linear city to show how depth can generate value by creating local monopolies in less integrated spaces. Then, a new syntactic measure, the d-value, is proposed to capture the relation between the depth of some space from outside and the mean depth of all spaces from outside. An application to a public housing estate suggests that economic activities and services may be located in spaces with a d-value close to one. The article is complemented by a Prolog programme with a special predicate to compute the d-value.