Examination of Factors Controlling the Location of Commercial and Industrial Development within the Metropolitan Area.

This 1993 report is the second of three research projects focusing on factors affecting the socio-economic vitality of the Fully Developed Area (FDA) in context with overall development patterns of the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area.Prepared under contract # C-93-32 for the Metropolitan Council

Regional Sewer System Rate Structure Study.

This 1992 report is the first of three research projects focusing on factors affecting the socio-economic vitality of the Fully Developed Area (FDA) in context with overall development patterns of the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area.Prepared under contract # C-93-32 for the Metropolitan Council

Spring-Block Model Reveals Region-Like Structures

A mechanical spring-block model is used for realizing an objective space partition of settlements from a geographic territory in region-like structures. The method is based on the relaxation-dynamics of the spring-block system and reveals in a hierarchical manner region-like entities at different spatial scales. It takes into account in an elegant manner both the spatiality of the elements and the connectivity relations among them. Spatiality is taken into account by using the geographic coordinates of the settlements, and by detecting the neighbors with the help of a Delaunay triangulation. Connectivity between neighboring settlements are quantified using a Pearson-like correlation for the relative variation of a relevant socio-economic parameter (population size, GDP, tax payed per inhabitant, etc.). The method is implemented in an interactive JAVA application and it is applied with success for an artificially generated society and for the case of USA, Hungary and Transylvania

Human Mobility in a Continuum Approach

Human mobility is investigated using a continuum approach that allows to calculate the probability to observe a trip to anyarbitrary region, and the fluxes between any two regions. The considered description offers a general and unified framework, in which previously proposed mobility models like the gravity model, the intervening opportunities model, and the recently introduced radiation model are naturally resulting as special cases. A new form of radiation model is derived and its validity is investigated using observational data offered by commuting trips obtained from the United States census data set, and the mobility fluxesextracted from mobile phone data collected in a western European country. The new modeling paradigm offered by this description suggests that the complex topological features observed in large mobility and transportation networks may be the result of a simple stochastic process taking place on an inhomogeneous landscape.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figure

Geography: De Facto or De Jure

ABSTRACT-The acceptance of the Kantian classification of geography among the sciences as the science of space carries with it certain methodological obligations. Geographers who advocate a macroscopic approach to research are especially bound by Kantian strictures to employ mechanistic models of gravity, equilibrium and potential force fields in their studies. The limitations of such functional models in formulating hypotheses and the underlying assumptions these models make in causal explanations are examined in detail. Reference is made to a number of studies in the post-war period, culminating in the programmatic statement for the macroscopic method in geography published by the Geographical Review in April, 1958