A Theoretical Framework and Methodology for Characterising National Urban Systems on the Basis of Flows of People: Empirical Evidence for France and Germany

Abstract

Summary. In advanced economies, flows play an important part in connecting urban nodes. This paper sets up a framework for identifying and classifying the pattern of the urban systems from an interaction perspective. Three S-dimensions are proposed (that is, the strength of interaction, the symmetry of interaction and the structure of the network) and a set of indices that are important for characterising network configurations. Using the European long-distance mobility database (DATELINE), the framework is applied to examine the pattern of interaction between functional urban areas (FURs) in France and Germany. The analysis is carried out separately for three journey purposes: business, holiday and leisure. The results reveal that national urban systems embrace a wide variety of constellations and that considerable variation in these constellations can be observed across journey purposes and countries. Overall, the authors are confident that the proposed framework provides a useful analytical tool for characterising the configurations of urban systems.

Ranking functional urban regions: A comparison of interaction and node attribute data

“…First, the functional interdependencies should ideally be derived from interaction data such as daily commuter flows. For many countries in the study area we do not have access to such data, so we have defined the metropolitan areas on the basis of five variables from EUROSTAT (REGIO) measured at the NUTS-3 4 level for Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Germany, and the UK: the ratio of jobs to the size of the active population; the number of jobs; job density; the number of inhabitants; population density (see Limtanakool et al, 2007 for more details). Second, because the REGIO data is not fully complete at the NUTS-3 level for Austria, Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain, we have had to rely on information at NUTS-2 level for these countries.…”

Measuring hierarchical differentiation: connectivity and dominance in the European urban network

“…In this section, we discuss the measurement of hierarchical differentiation based on an adapted and extended version of the framework presented in Limtanakool et al (2007). As mentioned in the introduction, we will focus on two aspects of hierarchical differentiation, i.e.…”

“…Before applying the analytical framework adapted from Limtanakool et al (2007) to airline data, we modified it in two ways. The first modification stems from the fact that intuitively clear notions such as 'small differences' or 'large differences' between the different DIT i and RSI ij values cannot be interpreted (7) The normalized value of the standard deviation (SD) of RSI ij is computed as follows:…”

“…In this respect we seek to complement the work of Patuelli et al (2007Patuelli et al ( , 2010 and Schintler et al (2007), who propose to 'decode' the complexity of spatial networks by developing appropriate measures of network connectivity (see Reggiani and Nijkamp 2007). The research presented here builds on the work of Limtanakool et al (2007), who introduce a number of spatial interaction indices with the aim of examining the pattern of interaction between Functional Urban Areas (FURs) in France and Germany. Based on the values for these indices, the urban network configuration in both countries was located on the continuum between the archetypal fully monocentric and fully polycentric networks.…”

“…The subsequent section presents the four spatial interaction indices based on the work of Limtanakool et al (2007), after which some preliminary results are used to call for the extension of this framework. The two next sections focus on the proposed changes and the main results respectively, after which the paper is concluded with an overview of our main findings.…”