Abstract
This paper investigates the impact of the city’s urban spatial structure in shaping population density distribution over time. This research question is relevant in Barcelona because urban population grew at a sustained pace in various decades due to intense immigration inflows. When the urban spatial structure fails to behave as the backbone of population density distribution, population distribution can suffer from polarization problems. We conduct our empirical study using an urban monocentric framework, tracking the different spatial distribution patterns of the overall population and a few selected urban communities in light of the degree of attractiveness of the central business district (CBD). To this end, we construct an original database by each district in Barcelona from 1902 to 2011 and perform an econometric analysis. Our results reveal that the urban spatial structure continued to be a crucial determinant over time for shaping the overall population distribution in Barcelona and in almost all selected communities. However, its importance fluctuated over time, bottoming out in the 1950s–1960s, and whose resurgence was mostly driven by the political initiative to create a new centrality in the urban periphery. This policy reinforced the attractiveness of the CBD, resulting in the de-facto avoidance of urban polarization.
Highlights
Barcelona (Spain) has been a preferred destination for internal and international migrants since the beginning of the twentieth century.1 The city represents an interesting case in the Mediterranean region given the availability of urban data on the presence of foreign communities since the early twentieth century
In order to perform the empirical analysis, we rely on an augmented version of the population density distribution function for a monocentric urban structure inspired by the negative exponential function introduced by Clark (1951)
In this study we track changes in centrality of the CDB as a determinant of the population density distribution of Barcelona over the twentieth century, when the city experienced an important increase in population size Our estimation results confirm that the urban spatial structure has shaped population density distribution over time in Barcelona (H.1) and that, in turn, it has been affected by sizable demographic change in the form of large immigrant inflows over the last two decades (H.2)
Summary
Barcelona (Spain) has been a preferred destination for internal and international migrants since the beginning of the twentieth century. The city represents an interesting case in the Mediterranean region given the availability of urban data on the presence of foreign communities since the early twentieth century. Barcelona (Spain) has been a preferred destination for internal and international migrants since the beginning of the twentieth century.. The city represents an interesting case in the Mediterranean region given the availability of urban data on the presence of foreign communities since the early twentieth century. The longstanding tradition of Barcelona as a migration destination makes this city a good laboratory for understanding how an important increase in population size impact the socio-economic composition of the population and has an influence on the possible rise or consolidation of spatial segregation.. In the case of Berlin, Hornung (2019) shows that the heterogeneous composition of migrant inflows (above all skilled immigrants) to Berlin’s newly developed city quarters had beneficial results in economic terms by nurturing the creation of job-complementarities with natives
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