Commercial and industrial land use change, job decentralization andgrowth controls: a spatially explicit analysis

摘要

This article studies the creation of commercial and industrial spaces and consequently jobsin suburban and exurban areas of Montgomery County, MD - part of the Washington, DC,metropolitan area. We utilize a spatially explicit framework of land use change analysis -which to date, has been applied solely in studies of residential decentralization and sprawl ---to examine employment decentralization, a dominant trend in the United States. In view ofthe actual and potential impacts of this Corm of urban development, we argue for the needfor balanced attention to both residential and job decentralization due to inconclusiveevidence on whether people follow jobs or firms follow people towards suburbia andexurbia. We test the significance of market conditions, local government growth controlsand other factors as drivers of industrial and commercial land use change through discretechoice statistical models.