Alonso, William

William Alonso (1933–1999)—architect, regional scientist, urban planner, demographer, and regional policy analyst—developed the first and enduring model of metropolitan land use decision making and urban rent determination and went on to a distinguished career as an urban theorist, demographer, and policy advisor. Alonso came to the United States from Argentina in 1941 at the age of 14 when his distinguished philologist father fled the repression of the Perón regime to take up a position at Harvard University.

Early on, Alonso was a theorist relying upon deductive reasoning and empirical analysis to explore urban spatial form. He was the first PhD graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's pioneering regional science department and a founding member of the Regional Science Association. As a young professor in city and regional planning at University of California, Berkeley, he initiated, with others, the social science revolution in urban planning that addressed larger issues of urban evolution and policy with tools from economics, political science, and sociology. Alonso's interdisciplinary background was a tremendous strength, and he became a leading demographer in the 1970s as director of the Center for Population Studies at Harvard University, where he headed an extraordinary academic review of the U.S. Census that resulted in significant changes. He became a prominent theorist of European urban system [Page 20]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 intermetro-politan explorations of the economics of urban size, migration flows, urban disamenities, and longer-term 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.

...