Social Interaction and Urban Sprawl

By Jan K. Brueckner, A. Largey. Social Science Research Network, 2008

321 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Various authors, most notably Putnam [Putnam, R.D., 2000. Bowling Alone. Simon and Schuster, New York], have argued that low-density living reduces social capital and thus social interaction, and this argument has been used to buttress criticisms of urban sprawl. If low densities in fact reduce social interaction, then an externality arises, validating Putnam's critique. In choosing their own lot sizes, consumers would fail to consider the loss of interaction benefits for their neighbors when lot size is increased. Lot sizes would then be inefficiently large, and cities excessively spread out. The paper tests the premise of this argument (the existence of a positive link between interaction and density) using data from the Social Capital Benchmark Survey. In the empirical work, social interaction measures for individual survey respondents are regressed on census-tract density and a host of household characteristics, using an instrumental-variable approach to control for the potential endogeneity of density.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2e5066e0d93da55d57e8be1c537048b4696af76b

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Citations in the corpus

• Does Urban Sprawl Increase the Costs of Providing Local Public Services? Evidence from Spanish Municipalities (2010, unknown): “…and Richardson (1997), Downs (1998, 1999), Burchell et al. (2002), Glaeser and Kahn (2004), Nechyba and Walsh (2004), Brueckner (2000, 2001a), Brueckner and Largey (2008), Sierra Club (1998), Kahn (2000) and Henderson and Mitra (1996), among others, also offer an explanation of the many…”
• A discrete–continuous model of households’ vehicle choice and usage, with an application to the effects of residential density (2008, methodology): “The first one follows the methodology developed in Dubin and McFadden (1984) and Hannemann (1985), where a conditional indirect utility function, giving the maximum utility achievable, provides the basis for deriving the continuous demand and the discrete choice.”
• Sense of Community and Its Association With the Neighborhood Built Environment (2014, background): “Moreover, Brueckner and Largey (2008) also posited that low density environments can increase opportunities for informal social encounters as larger lot sizes lead to more outdoor activities (e.”
• The Built Environment and Social Capital: A Systematic Review (2018, background): “The studies discussed in this review are cross-sectional studies that encompass a multiplicity of scales from single neighborhood comparisons (Brown & Cropper, 2001; Nasar, 2003; Podobnik, 2011; Skjaeveland & Garling, 1997) to county-level comparisons (Brueckner & Largey, 2008; Nguyen, 2010).”