Cities Spatial Model
The IGC Cities Spatial Model helps policymakers understand how various infrastructure investments and policy decisions affect the spatial distribution of people, firms, and economic activity in a city. By capturing key equilibrium effects, it supports better planning and policy design to promote inclusive, productive urban growth.
Policymakers worldwide face daily decisions on allocating scarce resources, with large infrastructure investments, planning regulations, and urban regeneration projects significantly impacting the city's spatial form, residents, and economy.
Recent research using structural spatial models has quantified how local urban policies and investments shape outcomes across the entire city, showing how policies affect residential and production locations, commuting prices, floorspace prices, wages, productivity and population welfare. The Cities Spatial Model operationalises one of these models in a user-friendly format, enabling policymakers to apply this framework to various policy questions with minimal data inputs and programming knowledge.
You can start exploring the Cities Spatial Model through the Shiny app, which offers an intuitive, interactive interface requiring no coding. For more advanced or customised analysis you can use the R package.
Resources
Our online course takes you through the core intuition behind the Cities Spatial Model, explaining its components and demonstrating why it is such a powerful tool for analysing local urban policies. You will also learn how to prepare the required data and create clear, effective visualisations.
For more information on the Cities Spatial Model, please read our policy toolkit.
For a more technical description of the basic model, and its application in Cape Town, please read our working paper.
Cities Spatial Model: A Quantitative Spatial Equilibrium Model to guide urban planning, policy, and infrastructure investment decisions
Evaluating economic gains to urban investments and policies: Introducing IGC’s Cities Spatial Model
