Spatio-Temporal Structure of Population Growth in Urban Regions: The Cases of Tel-Aviv and Haifa, Israel

Abstract

Despite the growing awareness of the urban field as an urban entity extending beyond metropolitan area boundaries, the research on its internal spatial structure is still scarce. This study aims for a description of the spatio-temporal structure of population growth in the urban regions of Tel-Aviv and Haifa. The spatio-temporal trends of population growth in these regions are traced and analysed by the application of a multi-variate regression model using a compound spatio-temporal polynomial power series. The analysis is performed adirectionally for each urban region as a whole and it is repeated separately for three different geographic sectors in each region. Structural differences were found to exist between the larger and smaller urban regions as well as among the different geographic sectors. It is demonstrated that in the smaller urban region of Haifa the structural pattern obtained for the whole urban region misrepresents the unique trends that pertain to different directions.