ancient cities

20 Amsterdam, the Netherlands
change following the formation of the European
Union and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Alonso’s seminal work is Location and Land Use,
in which he improved on Johann Heinrich von
Thünen’s early nineteenth-century zone theory of
agricultural land use and rents, adapting it radically
for a metropolitan setting. He sought to understand
why higher-income households in twentieth-century
United States chose to live farther from the city center,
whereas in Europe and his native Argentina they
favored the core. Part of his larger argument was a
location model in which the household’s utility is a
positive function of land space consumed and dollars
spent on a composite good (all goods other than land)
and a negative function of commuting distance to
work in the core. A budget constraint reflects the unit
price of the composite good, a price for land that varies
with distance to work, and the monetary cost of
commuting, a function of commuting distance. He
inferred that higher-income American families favored
larger lots and housing size and were willing to incur
greater time and money costs of commuting as a
result. He predicted bid-rent curves (how much rent
people will pay for residential land given its distance
from a specified point) that decline with distance from
the core. In his first foray into policy, he speculated on
the implication of his and other historical and structural
urban form theories for urban renewal.
Although he continued to use microeconomic and
macroeconomic theories in influential intermetropolitan
explorations of the economics of urban size,
migration flows, urban disamenities, and longerterm
development trajectories, Alonso pioneered the
leavening of regional science with behavioral theory
and methods in the social sciences. Two widely read
collections that he coedited with John Friedmann
showcased an eclectic approach that encompassed
location theory and abstract urban modeling along
with growth pole and other applied theories. His
own elegant statement, “From Alfred Weber to
Max: The Shifting Style of Regional Policy,” did
much to ensure that regional science would remain a
field open to different disciplines and committed to
policy analysis as well as theorizing.
As director of the Center for Population Studies
at Harvard University from 1976 on, Alonso dramatically
broadened the field of demography
beyond mechanistic population forecasting by
emphasizing the importance of social science theories
of fertility behavior and interregional migration
as important determinants of differential
urban growth rates. More importantly, he launched
a remarkable multiyear interdisciplinary study of
the U.S. Population Census and its anachronisms,
resulting in the book The Politics of Numbers (with
Paul Starr) and prompting important improvements
in future census content, process, and reporting.
Bitten by the policy bug at an early age, Alonso
spent his final decade anticipating new pressures and
changes in the European system of cities following the
demise of the Soviet Union and the quickening pace
of European economic integration. In several papers
he predicted greater polarization in Europe as the
largest cities jockeyed for position, with some specializing
in trade, finance, and governance. He paid
attention to the periphery and its problems, accurately
predicting the key role that continued regional
policy would play in building union-wide solidarity.
Over his 40-year career, Alonso served on several
panels of the National Academy of Sciences and as a
consultant to the United Nations, the World Bank,
the European Commission, the U.S. Departments of
Commerce, Agriculture, and Housing and Urban
Development, and 16 national governments beyond
the United States. His many and diverse contributions
were celebrated in a special issue of the International
Regional Science Review in 2001.
Ann Markusen
See also Housing; Journey to Work; Location Theory;
Urban Economics
Further Readings
Alonso, William. 1964. Location and Land Use.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 1990. “From Alfred Weber to Max: The Shifting
Style of Regional Policy.” Pp. 25–41 in Dynamics and
Conflict in Regional Structural Change, edited by M.
Chatterji and R. E. Kuenne. London: Macmillan.
Alonso, William and Paul Starr, eds. 1987. The Politics
of Numbers. New York: Russell Sage.
Friedmann, John and William Alonso, eds. 1964.
Regional Development and Planning: A Reader.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Am s t e r d A m, t H e ne t H e r l A n d s
Amsterdam is the capital of the Netherlands, and
with 750,000 inhabitants it is also its largest city.