Alison Weingarden, Carsten Dolle, Claire Hoffmann, Ana Moreno Monroy (p), Nikos Patias, Paolo Veneri

Marcos Díaz Ramírez

Regions vary in the extent to which their inhabitants cluster in settlements of different sizes from villages to cities. Differences in settlements’ populations also impact the accessibility of important services such as schools and hospitals. In many countries, the number and variety of services within regions depend on the relative sizes and travel times between settlements.

This paper uses detailed geocoded data for approximately 30 OECD countries to investigate the location of public and private sector services. It builds a statistical model that relates population to the prevalence of services across space. The existence of at least one service location is assessed for uncommon services like universities whereas for common services like schools, the total number of locations are assessed. While the existence and prevalence of services are generally increasing in population, the model also shows that settlements of all sizes provide more health and educational services when they are regional centres (i.e. the largest settlement within a certain driving threshold). In towns and villages, hospitals are less common and pharmacies are less prevalent when there is a city nearby, whereas this is not the case for educational services. Schools are prevalent in settlements of all sizes while universities are uncommon in towns and villages regardless of whether they have access to a city. Population centre sizes and proximity are both important predictors of service provision across the urban hierarchy.

David Burgalassi, Paolo Veneri (p), Alison Weingarden

Ana Moreno Monroy

This paper aims at providing a definition of intermediary cities and towns and to assess their specific demographic trends during the last decade across OECD countries. Ultimately, the goal of this study is to understand the role of intermediary settlements for regional development, especially for regions otherwise too remote. More specifically, settlement networks composed of intermediary cities and towns can actively contribute to improving local and regional well-being, provided that they are endowed with the supply of key services (e.g., health, education, finance, transport) accessible to people and businesses.
The paper provides three main contributions. First, it provides a conceptual and operational definition of “intermediary settlements”, namely cities and towns with specific criteria in terms of size, hierarchy, and functions. Those criteria make them centres for a wider regional territory connecting urban and rural areas, including in more remote contexts. Second, intermediary settlements’ population trends during the last decade are assessed and compared with those of other types of settlements by applying novel granular data on population, accessibility, and availability of services (health, education, finance) at a settlement level. Third, the specific characteristics of intermediary settlements associated to trends of population growth relative to national average are investigated.
The definition of intermediary cities and towns includes three main criteria. First, settlements need to meet population size thresholds to ensure they are in the intermediate portion of the city-size distribution and not in the tails. Second, intermediary settlements need to be regional centres, meaning that they need to be available for a significant amount of space surrounding them rather than being satellites of other larger agglomerations. Third, intermediary settlements need to be centres of service provision for a wider population base than that corresponding to its population.
Overall, intermediary settlements account for near one fourth of total settlements’ population. However, our results reveal a strong heterogeneity across countries – including in terms of their size, the function they play, and their role within the national urban structure – which manifests in differentiated development trajectories. Population growth in intermediary settlements have been slower than other types of settlements – especially larger agglomerations – in most countries. The degree of remoteness as well as the absence of some key-services are possible explicatory factors for demographic trends.

Rudiger Ahrend, Alexandre Banquet, Manuel Betin, Maria Paula Caldas, Boris Cournede, Marcos Díaz Ramírez (p), Pierre-Alain Pionnier, Daniel Sanchez-Serra, Paolo Veneri, Volker Ziemann

Paolo Veneri

The rise of remote working in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic may have reshaped people’s preferences on how and where to live in a permanent fashion, thus generating a new geography of housing demand. So far, the literature has mainly focused on what has become known as the “doughnut effect”, the hollowing out of city centres. However, effects are likely to go beyond large metropolitan areas, and more generally may affect preferences with respect to urban or rural living in more nuanced ways. This paper brings some early answers to these questions. Using the degree of urbanisation of places, as well as changes in relative housing prices as a proxy for short-term changes in housing demand, it confirms that changes have indeed gone beyond metropolitan borders. Interestingly, we are not seeing a re-emerging preference for rural life as such, but rather a desire to move to places that combine the benefits of rural and urban life. In suburban settings (typically with comparatively higher population densities) housing demand has particularly increased in the more rural parts. In contrast, beyond metropolitan boundaries where most space tends to be rural, increasing housing demand has been focused on cities.