Robin Morphet - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Robin Morphet

Understanding patterns and competitions of short‐ and long‐term rental markets: Evidence from London

Transactions in GIS

This paper explores a decentralisation initiative in the United Kingdom-the Northern Powerhouse s... more This paper explores a decentralisation initiative in the United Kingdom-the Northern Powerhouse strategy (NPS)-in terms of its main goal: strengthening connectivity between Northern cities of England. It focuses on economic interactions of these cities, defined by ownership linkages between firms, since the NPS's launch in 2010. The analysis reveals a relatively weak increase in the intensity of economic regional patterns in the North, in spite of a shift away from NPS cities'traditional manufacturing base. These results suggest potential directions for policy-makers in terms of the future implementation of the NPS.

Geographical Analysis

Housing is a major source of inequality in England, but most house price variation studies are co... more Housing is a major source of inequality in England, but most house price variation studies are conducted at national or regional scale or, conversely, in a specific city. Detailed research at sub-regional level is missing, especially for the period after the global financial crisis. This research addresses this gap with an analysis of variation at local authority level across England between 2009 and 2016. A novel house price per square meter (HPM) dataset is used to control for property size effects in transaction price variation. The effects of two spatial levels (local authority (LA)-and Middle Layer Super Output) together with three time categorizations (quarterly, half-yearly, and yearly) is systematically explored using multilevel models. Results show that the time categorization effects are essentially identical and extremely small, in comparison with the LA effects. As annual effects provide the best model fit, LA annual house price trajectories are explored further. Overall higher HPM LAs grew faster over the 80-year period than lower HPM LAs. More locally the spatial pattern shows some variation in the overall pattern, with some LAs near London or Bristol exhibiting higher relative percentage HPM increases with a relatively lower initial HPM compared with their neighbors.

RESEARCH ARTICLE Urban Transfer Entropy across Scales

☯ These authors contributed equally to this work.

In this paper we created a novel framework for understanding housing affordability in England usi... more In this paper we created a novel framework for understanding housing affordability in England using a linked house price dataset. Regional house price studies revealed that after the global economic crisis, there was an unprecedented regional house price divergence driven by faster price increases in London from 2009 onwards. To ease England’s resulting housing affordability issues, we consider the scenario of a typical London homeowner to offer a new insight into local housing affordability by different property type in England and explore the best property search areas for homeowners moving out of London.

Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 2020

Exploring the nature of spatial and temporal variation in house prices is important because it ca... more Exploring the nature of spatial and temporal variation in house prices is important because it can help better understand such issues as affordability and equity of access to housing. In the UK, research on house price variation has been hindered by a lack of extensive data linking the prices of properties at different places and times to their physical attributes. This paper addresses this gap through using a new dataset linking Land Registry Price Paid Data to attribute data from Ordnance Survey and Energy Performance Certificates datasets. The new data are used to investigate spatial disparities in England’s house prices at four geographical scales (from local authority to individual address) between 2009 and 2016 – a period of sustained price rises after the global financial crisis of 2008. We selected two housing price measures for comparison, namely transaction price and the house price per square metre. Multilevel variance components models are used to estimate variation in t...

Palgrave Communications, 2019

The competition in space between rail and sea transport is of great significance to the integrati... more The competition in space between rail and sea transport is of great significance to the integration of Eurasia. This paper proposes a land and sea transport spatial balance model for container transport, which can extract a partition line on which transport costs by rail and sea are equal given a destination. Four scenarios are discussed to analyse the effects of different factors on the model. Then the model is empirically tested on current rail and sea transport networks to identify the transport competition pattern in Eurasia. The location of destinations, the freight costs, and time costs are the three main factors affecting the model. Among them, time costs are determined by the value of a container and its contents, the interest rate, and by time differences between land and sea transport. The case study shows that Eurasia forms a transport competition pattern with a land area to sea area ratio of about 1:2; this ratio, however, changes to 1:1 when time costs are considered. F...

Transportation, 1975

The use of growth factor models for trip distribution has given way in the past to the use of mor... more The use of growth factor models for trip distribution has given way in the past to the use of more complex synthetic models. Nevertheless growth factor models are still used, for example in modelling external trips, in small area studies, in input-output analysis, and in category analysis. In this article a particular growth factor model, the Furness, is examined. Its application and functional form are described together with the method of iteration used in its operation. The "expected information" statistic is described and interpreted and it is shown that the Furness model predicts a trip distribution which, when compared with observed trips, has the minimum expected information subject to origin and destination constraints. An equivalent entropy maximising derivation is described and the two methods compared to show how the Furness iteration can be used in gravity models with specified deterrence functions. A trip distribution model explicitly incorporating information from observed trips, is then derived. It is suggested that if consistency is to be maintained between iteration, calibration, and the derivation of gravity models, then expected information should be used as the calibration statistic to measure goodness of fit. The importance of consistency in this respect is often overlooked. Lastly, the limitations of the models are discussed and it is suggested that it may be better to use the Furness iteration rather than any other, since it is more fully understood. In particular its ease of calculation makes it suitable for use in small models computed by hand.

Exploring local authority travel time to London effects on spatio-temporal pattern of local authority house prices variation in England

The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL, May 1, 2020

WORKING PAPERS SERIES Gravity Model Calibration by Rent Paper 223 -June 20 Gravity Model Calibration by Rent

Von Thunen's Legendre Transform

The standard von Thunen construction for a monocentric city is shown to be a Legendre transform ... more The standard von Thunen construction for a monocentric city is shown to be a Legendre transform of the kind which underlies the statistical mechanical relationships of the standard maximum entropy transportation model. This allows the integration of the von Thunen analysis with the doubly constrained transportation model and shows the place of rents in the transportation model. This extension of the model clarifies its interpretation as a complete thermodynamic system for which the Maxwell relations may be derived.

Most spatio-temporal studies of house price in the UK are carried out at national or regional sca... more Most spatio-temporal studies of house price in the UK are carried out at national or regional scale, but house prices differences could be better understood at finer spatial scales. Since England’s house prices, standardised by the size of the property (£/m), have been shown to be somewhat clustered at local authority level and highly clustered at Middle Layer Super Output (MSOA) level, in the period 2009 to 2016, this research aims to further explore the nature of spatial and temporal variation in house prices at local authority level in England. Growth curve modelling offers a model-based description of the spatio-temporal patterns of local authority house price variation. This research explores local authority effects and three different time effects (quarter, half-year and year) on house price spatio-temporal variation. Results show that these three time effects are essentially identical and are extremely small, in comparison with local authority effects. Since annual effects pr...

House Price per Square Metre in England and Wales, 1995-2021

This house price per square metre dataset was created on 1/4/2021 and is based on the LR PPD, Dom... more This house price per square metre dataset was created on 1/4/2021 and is based on the LR PPD, Domestic EPCs and NSPL downloaded on the same day. It covers over 18 million transactions with 218 variables in England and Wales between 1/1/1995 and 26/2/2021. 16 of the 104 variables come from the LR PPD, 84 variables come from Domestic EPCs, one variable (lad21cd) from NSPL and three variables (i.e.id, classt, priceper) are created by the first author. Before the data linkage, a unique identifier (id) is created for all the unique EPCs after removing the individual lodgement identifier (i.e. LMK_KEY variable). During the data linkage, a variable named classt is created to identify 1:1 and 1:n linkage relationships. After the data linkage, a derived house price per square metre variable (i.e. priceper) is obtained through dividing the transaction price paid in the LR PPD with the total floor area variable in the EPC dataset. The NSPL (May 2021 version) is used to assign the local authori...

UCL Open Environment

Current research on residential house price variation in the UK is limited by the lack of an open... more Current research on residential house price variation in the UK is limited by the lack of an open and comprehensive house price database that contains both transaction price alongside dwelling attributes such as size. This research outlines one approach which addresses this deficiency in England and Wales through combining transaction information from the official open Land Registry Price Paid Data (LR-PPD) and property size information from the official open Domestic Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs). A four-stage data linkage is created to generate a new linked dataset, representing 79% of the full market sales in the LR-PPD. This new linked dataset offers greater flexibility for the exploration of house price (£/m2) variation in England and Wales at different scales over postcode units between 2011 and 2019. Open access linkage codes will allow for future updates beyond 2019.

Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science

Journal of Geographical Systems 16 363 385, Sep 24, 2014

We pose the central problem of defining a measure of complexity, specifically for spatial systems... more We pose the central problem of defining a measure of complexity, specifically for spatial systems in general, city systems in particular. The measures we adopt are based on Shannon's (in Bell Syst Tech J 27:379-423, 623-656, 1948) definition of information. We introduce this measure and argue that increasing information is equivalent to increasing complexity, and we show that for spatial distributions, this involves a trade-off between the density of the distribution and the number of events that characterize it; as cities get bigger and are characterized by more events-more places or locations, information increases, all other things being equal. But sometimes the distribution changes at a faster rate than the number of events and thus information can decrease even if a city grows. We develop these ideas using various information measures. We first demonstrate their applicability to various distributions of population in London over the last 100 years, then to a wider region of London which is divided into bands of zones at increasing distances from the core, and finally to the evolution of the street system that characterizes the built-up area of London from 1786 to the present day. We conclude by arguing that we need to relate these measures to other measures of

Thermodynamic potentials and phase change for transport systems

Centre For Advanced Spatial Analysis London Uk, Jul 1, 2010

The standard von Thunen construction for a monocentric city is shown to be a Legendre transform o... more The standard von Thunen construction for a monocentric city is shown to be a Legendre transform of the kind which underlies the statistical mechanical relationships of the standard maximum entropy transportation model. This allows the integration of the von Thunen analysis with the doubly constrained transportation model and shows the place of rents in the transportation model. This extension of the model clarifies its interpretation as a complete thermodynamic system for which the Maxwell relations may be derived.

Urban Transfer Entropy across Scales

PLOS ONE, 2015

The morphology of urban agglomeration is studied here in the context of information exchange betw... more The morphology of urban agglomeration is studied here in the context of information exchange between different spatio-temporal scales. Urban migration to and from cities is characterised as non-random and following non-random pathways. Cities are multidimensional non-linear phenomena, so understanding the relationships and connectivity between scales is important in determining how the interplay of local/regional urban policies may affect the distribution of urban settlements. In order to quantify these relationships, we follow an information theoretic approach using the concept of Transfer Entropy. Our analysis is based on a stochastic urban fractal model, which mimics urban growing settlements and migration waves. The results indicate how different policies could affect urban morphology in terms of the information generated across geographical scales.

Journal of Geographical Systems, 2014