The problem of fair division of surplus development rights in redevelopment of urban areas: Can the Shapley value help?

Many more people are expected to live in urban areas in the coming decades, and much of the physical transformation will take place in the built-up areas of cities. Landownership is a key factor in urban regeneration, and the fair division of benefits is a major obstacle to redeveloping urban land in a cooperative context. This paper aims to show that the Shapley value, a fair division scheme developed within the cooperative game theory framework, can be used to achieve a fair division of the surplus development rights among landowners remolding smaller and irregular parcels into bigger and regular ones, resulting in higher aggregate development rights. The methodology is illustrated by a case study of three parcels selected from the Karabaglar district in Izmir, Turkey, where surplus development rights are available for landowners cooperating for land amalgamation. The findings show that the Shapley values for the landowners satisfy the core conditions of the game and landowners can benefit from the highest possible development rights and share the surplus fairly. However, the current institutional setting has to be restructured to apply such division schemes

Examining the Street Patterns in Izmir in the 19th Century: A network based spatial analysis

Izmir, or the Greek Smyrna, had been the largest seaport on the Aegean coast of Anatolia, since the ancient times. It has experienced a notable growth, after the devastating earthquake in 1686 and has become one of the most important ports of the Eastern Mediterranean starting from the eighteenth century. There is an extensive literature on the past social and economic life of the City of Izmir, Turkey. However, the historic spatial analysis of the city is largely neglected, similar to the most studies on Asian cities. The graph theory is used to compare the spatial structure of street networks in the quarters (neighborhoods) of Izmir in the 19th century. Six different indices are used: (1) edge density, (2) edge sinuosity, (3) eta index, (4) node density, (5) order of a node, and (6) beta index. The results showed that the urban street pattern varies with the cultural landscape. The findings regarding that that the Armenian, Frank and Greek quarters do not differ significantly in the means for the three local indices, and the Turkish quarter and the Jewish quarter differ from these three quarters and from each other, point out that religion may have determining role in forming the spatial structure. Further research may consider different spatial indices and may focus on a wider time spectrum to generalize these results. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd