Eduard J. ALVAREZ-PALAU, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain
Jordi MARTÍ-HENNEBERG, Universitat de Lleida, Spain
Guillermo ESTEBAN, Universitat de Lleida, Spain
Mateu MORILLAS, Universitat de Lleida, Spain
One of the main debates in our society deals with the increase in urbanisation rates. Year after year, more and more people migrate from rural to urban areas in pursuit of better living conditions. Changing agricultural practices, the lack of opportunities, or the scarcity of essential services, are some of the factors explaining this process. In this regard, this paper wants to analyse to which extent transport infrastructures have played a key role in magnifying this phenomenon. Transport connectivity brings better access, and therefore, improves production factors. However, it also gives people the chance of migrating to cities while keeping connected to their hometowns.
Our work builds upon the GIS reconstruction of roads, navigable rivers, railways, coastal routes and air connections to create an historical multi-modal transport model to assess passenger time improvements for 1850, 1900, 1950 and 2000. This model allows us to create average generalised accessibility indicators that we can then correlate with population data at the judicial district level using spatial econometrics. Other variables such as physical geography, endowments, location, or socioeconomic characteristics are used in order to control our regressions. Our initial hypothesis is that small cities with good infrastructure networks slightly declined population figures, but towns without connections plummeted.
This work wants to contribute to the recent attempts in the literature to introduce up-to-date network analysis modelling methods applied to historical data to estimate market access as an explanatory variable to explain changes in economic and demographic variables (Donaldson and Hornbeck 2016, Bogart et al 2017, Mimeur et al 2018).
Mots clés : market access|network analysis|multimodal transport|H-GIS|population distribution
A102814EA