ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to measure householders’ demand for innovative and possibly contentious forms of urban living, as well as for more traditional sustainable living environments such as dense inner suburbs. The notion of the compact city with mixed-use neighbourhoods has gained support at all levels of political decision making since the Brundtland Report first popularised the sustainable cities debate in the mid 1980s. Sustainable city policies relating to densification, use-mixing and use-zoning therefore have to be informed by a far more searching understanding of citizens aspirations, preferences and trade-offs. Residential movers are assumed to be rational decision-makers within their own individual frames of reference. They choose their most preferred option from the set of residential alternatives available to them. A stated preference design is used because the intention is to explore movers’ responses to both actual and potential mixes of attributes of the residential environment, especially in terms of mixed land use and density.
