Yolanda de Llanos Mancha (p), Luisa Alamá-Sabater (p), Miguel Ángel Márquez (p)

Alexandra Sandu

POPULATION DISTRIBUTION AND REGIONAL GROWTH

Authors: Alamá-Sabater, L.; de Llanos Mancha, Y. and Márquez, M. A.

Nowadays, studies on territorial development arise from different disciplines, although it is mainly economic geography that deals with the analysis of the factors that contribute to the improvement of local areas and regions. In particular, many studies published in the field of economic geography focus on exploring the linkages between rural and urban areas.

Furthermore, the heterogeneity of the territory and the different ways of approaching the development of regions have given rise to numerous papers published in relevant journals in the field of regional economics and territorial development. In this regard, different authors address this issue by referring to urban agglomeration and applying Williamson's hypothesis Williamson (1965) introduced the concept of an inverted U-shaped relationship between agglomeration and economic development, according to which the level of development of countries is linked to the impact of urban agglomeration on economic growth. This means that levels of concentration increase with economic development, but eventually decrease once a certain economic development threshold has been reached.

Considering the two aforementioned approaches, the literature has been focused mainly on the comparison of urban and rural areas. Grounded on the heterogeneity of the regions, the starting point of this paper will be the following question tag: do urban, semi-urban and rural areas develop at different speeds? Taking into account Eurostat's classification of municipalities, our work tries to determine the regional population structure that enhances regional development and generates positive effects on economic growth, as well as how the level of development contributes to setting an urban, semi-urban and rural population threshold. The main issue is to what extend the type of urbanization is helping the regions not to left behind. This paper proposes to analyze the following question: What is the contribution of the urban and intermediate population to the development of the regions? What is the most efficient population structure to improve regional development? The empirical analysis will be focused on the case of the Spanish provinces, showing evidence of the previous questions.

Miguel Puente-Ajovín, Marcos Sanso-Navarro, María Vera-Cabello (p)

Yolanda de Llanos Mancha

This paper compares the size distributions of cities when they are measured using gridded population and nighttime lights data. In doing so, we exploit recent and accurate satellite imagery to proxy urban economic activity. Our results suggest that, at country level, urban population is more equally distributed than light emissions. Further, the degree of urbanization and the availability of natural resources are robustly related to the parameters that characterize national city size distributions. Calling assumptions established for urban nighttime lights into question, our findings do not support a Pareto function for their distribution. Moreover, we obtain evidence of a nonlinear and heterogeneous link between urban population and night lights. Grounded on our empirical analysis, we also provide a theoretical framework that relates the difference between the distributions of population and light emissions to the magnitude of agglomeration economies.

Oana Mihaescu (p)

María Vera-Cabello

Pedestrianization has been widely used for revitalizing urban areas during the last decades, as it has been argued to come with a series of benefits: the reduction in congestion, road crashes, and related injuries; the increase in social interactions and safety; the improvement in the urban micro-climate; and the increase of the customer base in the area, which is argued to spill over the sales and employment of the local firms. Critics argue, however, that car-borne consumers have more purchasing power than pedestrian and mass transit users and that car access attracts customers from longer distances, widening the range of the local urban market; thus, restricting the access for cars drives away these consumers from the central markets.

Hence, whether pedestrianization is an urban amenity does not seem to have an easy answer; both these positive and negative effects are however capitalized in property prices, making them an appropriate proxy for measuring urban attractiveness and thus attempting to provide an elucidation to this dilemma. In this study I use a difference-in-difference-type estimation approach to investigate the effectiveness of pedestrianization schemes in Sweden. Based on a unique combination of three country-wide databases – on the changes in the length of the pedestrian streets, as well as the prices of residential and commercial properties – I compare property prices in a treatment area (i.e., in the neighborhood of streets with changes in the length of their pedestrian segments) before and after treatment and with property prices in a control group (i.e., in areas that have not experienced any changes in the length of their pedestrian segments).

The results indicate an average increase of +0.77% and +2.89% in the square-meter price of the residential and, respectively, commercial properties located in the treatment area, for every 10-meter increase in the length of the pedestrian street. This result is equivalent to a total average increase of 26 898 SEK (2 393.82 USD) 661 810 SEK (58 901.09 USD) in the average pre-treatment sales price for properties located in the treatment areas. A decrease by 10-meter in the length of the pedestrian street determines instead a decrease of -1.67% and 6.77% in the prices of the residential and, respectively, commercial properties in the treatment areas (-61 480.50 SEK (-5 471.76 USD)) and, respectively -1 550 330 SEK (137 979.37 USD)). The analysis also indicates that the effects diminish with distance from the closest pedestrian street.

Alexandra Sandu (p)

Oana Mihaescu

The study of post-socialist cities in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) has mainly focused on their political and socioeconomic dimensions, with less emphasizes put on their spatial identity. To address this gap, this study uses GIS and statistical analysis to examine the morphological and functional characteristics of 93 cities across 11 CEE countries. By constructing multiple profiles through radial analysis, the study presents data on the percentage of new built-up areas in Functional Urban Areas between 1990 and 2018, the percentage of total built-up area in 2018, and the spatial clustering of land-use types using Location Quotients. The findings show that post-socialist cities in Central and Eastern Europe have experienced significant urban expansion, with distinct residential and industrial/commercial specializations, as well as the growth of brownfields. The research aims to offer a more nuanced understanding of the spatial identity of post-socialist cities in CEE, as well as quantitative data that can assist urban planners and policymakers in developing more effective strategies to address the diversity and heterogeneity of these cities, as well as to accommodate their specific morphological and functional characteristics.