Real Estate & Planning Research Seminar by Luca S.D'Acci from the Polytechnic University of Turin. Title "Self-organized complexity in regional house prices distribution across cities"

Luca’s Bio and Abstract are below, and accompanying Papers attached here Allometry of housing price in urban scaling and Is housing price distribution across cities scale invariant

Bio

Luca S. D’Acci, former head of the Urban Environment, Sustainability and Climate Change department at the Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam, is Associate Professor at Politecnico di Torino, Honorary Fellow at the University of Birmingham and the Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam.

Part of his work revolves around human settlements enhancing quality of life, intended as individuals and societies achieving healthier, happier and longer lives. How our type of villages and cities can affect this goal?

His personalised educational path, ranging from engineering, economics, urbanism and mathematics to anthropology, gives him a poliedric touch to study such question.

He is leading the nascent e-centre for Urban Evolution Morphology: www.urem.eu.

In the recent years he is involved in how the size and form of cities influence our mental health and personal-societal progress. He developed a new way to quantify national well-being and progress and a new type of city idea called Isobenefit Urbanism which is recently gaining attention.

Being didactically the chair of Economic evaluations of plans and projects, of Real estate evaluations and of Investments analysis, adds an economic appraisal hint in his research: the way how we conceive values and evaluate plans and investments is what ultimately has the power to change our cities, villages, countryside, natural environments, which ultimately means changing our lives, ideally for the better.

Abstract

The distribution of house prices across cities appears to follow a power law, both in the rank-price and rank-size scaling. Doubling the rank of the settlement in terms of housing price, the latter decreases by 15 %; doubling it in terms of population size, its housing price rises by 9%. This is the first work finding scaling coefficients for house price and their power law distribution across cities. Power laws could sign self-organized complexities in the phenomena behind.