CEF.UP – WiP Seminar

Tuesday – December 3^rd, 2024 at 13:00h (1 pm) | Room 305

Agglomeration in an urban corridor

José Gaspar – FEP – School of Economics and Management, University of Porto and Cef.Up

Abstract:

We study agglomeration within a corridor characterized by a continuous path connecting a finite number of places where cities may locate. As economic integration changes, a corridor may undergo successive bifurcations whereby the number of cities increases (decreases) two by two in a way that preserves the bilateral symmetry of places around the central place. We focus on the bifurcation from the state of full agglomeration in the central place occurring at a critical level of economic integration, called the sustain point. For a particular model, full agglomeration becomes unstable below the sustain point and two identical cities may emerge stably with the same distance to the central city. The existence and uniqueness of both the sustain point and the optimal distance to the central city are determined analytically. We find that cities can only emerge optimally at places that are sufficiently far away from the central place, thereby generating a polycentric structure. As integration increases, a preexisting state of twin cities may engender a central city, which grows in size and may eventually develop further into a core city. Finally, we draw a comparison of our model with its discrete–space analogue and discuss the impact of local dispersion forces (e.g. congestion costs) on agglomeration.