The Economic Value of Depth

Abstract

The main goal of this article is to introduce an economic perspective in the social logic of space. Firstly, we describe the economic model of a linear city to show how depth can generate value by creating local monopolies in less integrated spaces. Then, a new syntactic measure, the d-value, is proposed to capture the relation between the depth of some space from outside and the mean depth of all spaces from outside. An application to a public housing estate suggests that economic activities and services may be located in spaces with a d-value close to one. The article is complemented by a Prolog programme with a special predicate to compute the d-value.