Urban Economics:
the monocentric city

1. 1

   The monocentric city model

   Assumptions, the condition that makes households indifferent between locations, developers’ choice of building height, the edge of the city, and comparative statics.

   In class: a five-step figure of the five gradients; a sandbox where population, income, commuting cost and agricultural rent can be changed, with land rent drawn as a surface that meets the level of agricultural rent at the edge of the city, next to the textbook cross-section.

2. 2

   Testing the model in Ho Chi Minh City

   Land prices set by the city and population density on a 1 km grid; where the city ends when it is measured with population data rather than with its administrative boundary; how the estimated gradients depend on choices of measurement; the city placed among 192 cities; and the two features the model does not describe.

   In class: a six-step scrolling map comparing the administrative city with the urban centre measured from population data, 1975–2030; maps with classed legends, a scatter with a fitted line, a sensitivity table, and a box plot of 192 cities.

3. 3

   When commuting becomes cheaper

   What the commuting cost of the model stands for in a real city; the motorcycle, and what the sources report about vehicles and speeds; the bridges, tunnel and expressways opened since 2008, and a model of the road network that measures how each changed the time to Ben Thanh, by motorcycle and by car; and public transport, including Metro Line 1.

   In class: a travel-time map with one step for each road network, a switch between motorcycle and car, and a view of the minutes saved; two tables of sourced figures; a chart of the land within 30 and 45 minutes of the centre.

4. 4

   Ho Chi Minh City among its neighbours

   Ho Chi Minh City beside Hanoi, Bangkok, Jakarta, Manila and Kuala Lumpur, all measured with the urban centre of the Global Human Settlement Layer: size, density and growth since 1990. A closer comparison of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City tests two statements of the World Bank against satellite data.

   In class: a map that moves from city to city at the same scale, six small maps side by side, built-up land from 1985 to 2015 around Hoan Kiem Lake and Ben Thanh, density profiles, a table of density gradients, and a map of road network density in seven cities.

5. 5

   How urban is Vietnam?

   The official definition of urban areas, the international Degree of Urbanisation and the lights that satellites see at night give very different answers. The lesson maps where they disagree and re-examines the evidence the World Bank used in 2020.

   In class: a chart of three definitions since 1975, a map of the Degree of Urbanisation with views of the two deltas, a table by region, a map of night-time lights from 1992 to 2024 and two charts of lit area.

AUsing the material in class

• Stepped figures. Figures with numbered buttons advance one step at a time; the ← and → keys do the same while the figure is on screen.
• Maps. Drag to pan, use + and − to zoom, and hover over a ward or a cell to read its value. Rotation is disabled, so north is always up.
• Offline. The pages, the data, the fonts and the mathematics work without a network. Only the grey base map behind the data needs the internet; without it, the data, the place names and the distance rings still appear.
• Opening the files. Double-click index.html. If a browser blocks local files, double-click Mo_bai_giang.cmd, which starts a small local server using components already present in Windows.

BHow the material is built

Four rules are enforced by node hoc_phan_ktdt/kiem.mjs, which fails the build rather than publishing a page that breaks them.

1. Every dataset carries its provenance. Source, licence, date of access and the script that produced it. A data file without them is refused when the page loads.
2. No number in the text is typed by hand. Results are inserted from the data files, so the text cannot drift away from the data behind it.
3. Model and measurement are drawn differently. Dashed lines are model output; solid lines and dots are measurements; a dashed dark line is a line fitted to data.
4. Only sources whose licence permits classroom distribution are used, and quotations are compared with the text of the source PDF by a script before they appear on a page.

CData used

Full citations are listed in the references of each lesson. Scripts that produce the data files are in kich_ban/; the data files themselves are in du_lieu/.