Urban Scaling and Effects of Municipal Boundaries
Pieter P. Tordoir, Anthony F.J. van Raan

TL;DR
This study investigates how municipal boundaries influence urban socio-economic performance by affecting commuting networks, revealing significant boundary effects especially between urban and rural areas, which may impact regional economic development.
Contribution
First empirical analysis of municipal boundary effects on urban scaling and commuting networks using spatially weighted modeling in the Randstad region.
Findings
Municipal borders significantly affect inter-municipal commuting patterns.
Boundaries between urban and rural areas show strong correlation with commuting disruptions.
Regional differences in boundary effects may explain economic divergence within the Randstad.
Abstract
Urban scaling, the superlinear increase of social and economic measures with increasing population, is an ubiquitous and well-researched phenomenon. This article is focused on socio-economic performance scaling, which could possibly be driven by increasing returns of the spatial size and density of interaction networks. If this is indeed the case, we should also find that spatial barriers to interaction affect scaling and cause local performance deviations. Possible barring effects of municipal boundaries are particularly interesting from the perspective of urban area governance policy and regional cooperation. To our best knowledge, this is the first study on this politically relevant and strongly disputed subject. We test the hypothesis of possible barring effects of municipal boundaries by correlating municipal boundaries with the structure of commuter networks within a large densely…
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Taxonomy
TopicsRegional Economics and Spatial Analysis · Spatial and Panel Data Analysis · Land Use and Ecosystem Services
