ABSTRACT
The built environment is the accumulated residual history of mostly man-made environmental change. It receives additions from new construction, it is reinvested in, adapted, refurbished and maintained, or the structures are disused, dilapidated and disappear in time, despite their generally extreme durability compared to other goods in the economy. For our purposes, the dynamics of how the modern built environment relates to the economy as a whole constitutes its changing nature. In this chapter, we shall explore the links between the economy and the built environment, relying on varieties of microeconomics: spatial economics and the economics of asymmetrical information, in particular that of signalling in markets; sometimes, it is useful to draw on contributions from other disciplines, notably economic geography, for broader approaches.
