Smart growth by design: Harnessing location rent dynamics to align urban form and sustainable mobility

The classical transportation problem is an important urban and regional planning and policy-making analytic tool as it has the potential to provide deep insights into the competitive advantage of locations for different activities. While the classical transportation problem and its variants have been extensively employed in commuting efficiency studies, insufficient attention has been paid to its mathematical dual. This paper aims to revisit the spatial interpretation of the duality of urban location modeling from the perspective of location rent theory. In doing so, the study integrates geovisualization and spatial analysis with the dual of a variant of the classical transportation problem to measure, interpret, and chart location rent surfaces for origins and destinations associated with realized rush-hour work trips across three economic sectors in a metropolitan region in Central Florida. Sensitivity analysis is conducted to determine the effects of spatial variability in the levels of workforce and employment in each economic sector for commuting efficiency. The spatial congruence between location rents and future land use under an alternative planning regime is evaluated at both regional and neighborhood scales. Results indicate that allocating future urban growth in residential and employment zones with the highest and lowest location rents, respectively, yields the most favorable jobs-housing balance. The findings also suggest that dual values derived from a spatial optimization problem can function as both descriptive and prescriptive tools, supporting the evaluation of planning initiatives, urban spatial structures, and both tactical and long-term land-use policies and growth management strategies.