Monocentric versus polycentric urban structure: Case study in Hong Kong

Activity resource allocation or dispersion (e.g., employment, education), transport network improvement, and property development, affect the urban community in different ways. To illuminate their intricate relations, we study the perspectives of three groups of stakeholders: i) households with heterogeneous members seeking a common residence to optimize their proximity to activity resources; ii) transport planners aiming to relieve traffic congestion; and iii) property developers aiming to maximize their housing profit through the bid-rent process. To assess the impacts of different resource allocation patterns (centralized versus dispersed), a household bid-rent and residential location choice model with heterogeneous compositions is developed, including household members’ activity destination choices and travel choices under stochastic user equilibrium. We apply this model to a new redevelopment region in Kowloon, Hong Kong. The results show that centralized resource allocation increases the producer surplus but reduces the household disposable income. Compared with dispersion in school resource allocation or transport improvement, job reallocation is the most efficient in alleviating traffic congestion as employments are dispersed into multiple centers, and inter-zonal commute trips are converted into intra-zonal trips. We also investigate the outcomes as the urban structure varies from monocentric, dual-core into multiple self-contained communities (i.e. polycentric). The results show that any accessibility gain due to a change in the urban form will be capitalized by developers into higher housing prices in the new central business district (CBD) regions, hence shrinking the consumer surplus and disposable income. Therefore, it is unlikely to find an urban form that will achieve win–win–win situations for all three stakeholder groups in the case study example.