The Skyscraper Revolution: Global Economic Development and Land Savings

© Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt, Nathaniel Baum-Snow, Rémi Jedwab

Overview: How do building height and land-use restrictions shape cities? We develop a model linking vertical construction, commercial and residential land use, and urban expansion. The framework allows us to study how height constraints affect population, wages, rents, welfare, and land consumption, with city-level counterfactual results covering 12,873 cities worldwide.

Webtool: This webtool has two complementary functions: a real-world city dashboard and a simulated city dashboard. Use the buttons below to move between them.

Real-world city dashboard: Explore the counterfactual results accompanying The Skyscraper Revolution: Global Economic Development and Land Savings (forthcoming in The Review of Economic Studies). Select a continent or region, country, city, and counterfactual. The available experiments remove all height limits, commercial height limits only, or residential height limits only. Bar charts report percentage changes relative to each city’s calibrated baseline for wages, residential rents, population, developed area, welfare, and other outcomes. The dashboard covers 12,873 cities worldwide.

Simulated city dashboard: Build a stylized city using the paper parameterization, then change productivity, residential amenities, construction costs, spatial decay, height/FAR limits, or an urban growth boundary. The tool solves the baseline and counterfactual equilibria in the browser and reports percentage changes in spatial outcomes and city-wide statistics.

The webtool is part of ABSJ2027 GitHub toolkit, which provides MATLAB and Python implementations of the city model for teaching, exploration, and counterfactual analysis, together with illustrated examples and documentation. The underlying city results are available inCSV and Excel formats. Use of the webtool and data is subject to citing our paper.

Interpretation: The simulations use stylized representations of cities that assume a monocentric land-use pattern, with economic activity organized around a single centre. This assumption fits some cities better than others. The results should therefore be read as model-based approximations, whose accuracy may vary across cities.