productivity premium

this was a short feasibility project funded by the productivity insights network to test some initial ideas on how an understanding of the links between connectivity and productivity can provide insights into how infrastructure and land-use can affects potential for economic performance.

current urban scale transport and land-use planning relies on input-intensive land-use transport interaction models that are inherently only capable of benchmarking predetermined infrastructure scenarios. in this project we attempted to further our current ability in identifying long-term land-use and transport planning targets by adapting recently developed models at the interface of complexity science and urban economics. the models, and by extension the project, brought together components from urban planning and economics with complexity and network science. these model economic output and population-size agglomeration effects through the proxy of social interaction counts. formulating the cities as a geographically embedded network of individual interactions dependent on the population’s skills and education levels and constrained by the mobility infrastructure network enables optimization of the cities’ layout to maximize these social connections.

the whole effort is documented in a report for the network and was the basis of a currently ongoing esrc impact acceleration account project looking out long-term public transport planning in the south yorkshire mayoral combined authority.