Robustness and Persistence in the Italian Urban Landscape

Giovanni Barbieri () and Lorenzo Barbieri

ERSA conference papers from European Regional Science Association

Abstract: Local systems are conglomerations of municipalities held together by commuting links. ? Are they real life objects or the result of some cryptic algorithm? Real life objects. Real life cities, to be precise, even if not made of brick and mortar, but of relationships. Relationships is the matter cities are made of. ? Can you prove it? Not in the sense we can prove a theorem. But we can bring you convincing evidence based on natural experiments of history . Statistics Italy (Istat) has been disseminating local systems based on commuting data collected on the occasion of population censuses since 1971. Recently, it changed the algorithm generating local systems. This gives the opportunity for a three-way comparison between local systems geographies: * between the 2001 and 2011 results obtained with different algorithms; * between the 2001 and 2011 results obtained with the same (new) algorithm; * between the 2001 geographies resulting from the application of different (old and new) algorithms. This way, we can identify persistent local systems, those found by the same (new) algorithm both in 2001 and 2011; robust local systems, those identified in 2001 no matter which algorithm was used; local systems which are both robust and persistent, and so on. The main result, the one that proves the point that we were making above, is that out of 611 local systems, 503 are both robust and persistent. Many of them maintained the same name and are composed of the same municipalities; many others gained or lost municipalities, but still maintained their identity and their core. Those systems in 2011 account for 5,215 core municipalities and 47 million inhabitants, 79% of the total population of Italy. The remaining municipalities and systems are characterized by weak commuting links and either are located in remote areas or represent the contendible margins of strong systems.

Keywords: Local systems; comparison; cities; commuting; Italy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-10
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www-sre.wu.ac.at/ersa/ersaconfs/ersa15/e150825aFinal00751.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wiw:wiwrsa:ersa15p751

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ERSA conference papers from European Regional Science Association Welthandelsplatz 1, 1020 Vienna, Austria.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gunther Maier ().