Decentralisation versus Territorial Inequality: A Comparative Review of English City Region Policy Discourse

The most recent English attempts at decentralisation take the shape of the city region devolution policy agenda. Decentralisation claims to empower localities and address regional growth imbalances, while creating a variety of new temporary and selective fiscal and geographic arrangements in policy-making that have the potential to create the opposite effect. This paper focuses on the relationship between decentralisation and territorial inequalities through the analysis of strategic discourse of six ‘devolved authorities’. A quantitative, qualitative, and comparative approach to this question complements the traditional insights obtained from in-depth case study analysis using actors’ interviews. It focuses on city regions’ official discourse of self-conceptualisation and marketization, and thereby highlights the wider policy and regional theory context of their production to frame the structural factors impacting the rewriting of city regional space. By doing so, we find a number of issues with the current decentralisation approach in competing priorities between localities, an over-reliance on agglomeration economies and urban competition, potential mismatches in scales of policy decision-making and delivery, and challenges regarding inequalities in a post-Brexit England

Paradoxical Interpretations of Urban Scaling Laws

Scaling laws are powerful summaries of the variations of urban attributes with city size. However, the validity of their universal meaning for cities is hampered by the observation that different scaling regimes can be encountered for the same territory, time and attribute, depending on the criteria used to delineate cities. The aim of this paper is to present new insights concerning this variation, coupled with a sensitivity analysis of urban scaling in France, for several socio-economic and infrastructural attributes from data collected exhaustively at the local level. The sensitivity analysis considers different aggregations of local units for which data are given by the Population Census. We produce a large variety of definitions of cities (approximatively 5000) by aggregating local Census units corresponding to the systematic combination of three definitional criteria: density, commuting flows and population cutoffs. We then measure the magnitude of scaling estimations and their sensitivity to city definitions for several urban indicators, showing for example that simple population cutoffs impact dramatically on the results obtained for a given system and attribute. Variations are interpreted with respect to the meaning of the attributes (socio-economic descriptors as well as infrastructure) and the urban definitions used (understood as the combination of the three criteria). Because of the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem and of the heterogeneous morphologies and social landscapes in the cities internal space, scaling estimations are subject to large variations, distorting many of the conclusions on which generative models are based. We conclude that examining scaling variations might be an opportunity to understand better the inner composition of cities with regard to their size, i.e. to link the scales of the city-system with the system of cities

Mobile phone indicators and their relation to the socioeconomic organisation of cities

Thanks to the use of geolocated big data in computational social science research, the spatial and temporal heterogeneity of human activities are increasingly being revealed. Paired with smaller and more traditional data, this opens new ways of understanding how people act and move, and how these movements crystallise into the structural patterns observed by censuses. In this article we explore the convergence of mobile phone data with more classical socioeconomic data from census in French cities. We extract mobile phone indicators from six months worth of Call Detail Records (CDR) data, while census and administrative data are used to characterize the socioeconomic organisation of French cities. We address various definitions of cities and investigate how they impact the relation between mobile phone indicators, such as the number of calls or the entropy of visited cell towers, and measures of economic organisation based on census data, such as the level of deprivation, inequality and segregation. Our findings show that some mobile phone indicators relate significantly with different socioeconomic organisation of cities. However, we show that found relations are sensitive to the way cities are defined and delineated. In several cases, differing city definitions delineations can change the significance or even the signs of found correlations. In general, cities delineated in a restricted way (central cores only) exhibit traces of human activity which are less related to their socioeconomic organisation than cities delineated as metropolitan areas and dispersed urban regions.Comment: 19 pages, 9 figures, 2 table

A modular modelling framework for hypotheses testing in the simulation of urbanisation

In this paper, we present a modelling experiment developed to study systems of cities and processes of urbanisation in large territories over long time spans. Building on geographical theories of urban evolution, we rely on agent-based models to 1/ formalise complementary and alternative hypotheses of urbanisation and 2/ explore their ability to simulate observed patterns in a virtual laboratory. The paper is therefore divided into two sections : an overview of the mechanisms implemented to represent competing hypotheses used to simulate urban evolution; and an evaluation of the resulting model structures in their ability to simulate - efficiently and parsimoniously - a system of cities (the Former Soviet Union) over several periods of time (before and after the crash of the USSR). We do so using a modular framework of model-building and evolutionary algorithms for the calibration of several model structures. This project aims at tackling equifinality in systems dynamics by confronting different mechanisms with similar evaluation criteria. It enables the identification of the best-performing models with respect to the chosen criteria by scanning automatically the parameter along with the space of model structures (as combinations of modelled dynamics).Comment: 21 pages, 3 figures, working pape

Modèles de régression multiniveaux avec R

 Multiniveaux avec R Les modèles multiniveaux se basent sur des données dites "hiérarchiques", c'est-à-dire comprenant deux ou plusieurs niveaux (ceux-ci pouvant être sociaux ou géographiques, par exemple : les niveaux de l’élève, de son établissement et de l’académie; les niveaux de la ville, de sa région d'appartenance et du pays concerne). Leur utilisation se base sur le principe que les différents niveaux interagissent dans les deux sens, et s’intègre particulièrement bien au paradigme de..

RStudio : sa vie, son oeuvre, ses ressources (Suite)

Parmi les ressources disponibles sur le site de RStudio, un ensemble de fiches graphiques et synthétiques récapitulant les indispensables concepts/arguments de fonction/commandes abordés au cours des différentes sessions ElementR 2012-2013 (manipulation de données, ggplot2) et 2014-2015 (Markdown, construction de packages, Shiny)

RStudio : sa vie, son oeuvre, ses ressources (Suite)

Parmi les ressources disponibles sur le site de RStudio, un ensemble de fiches graphiques et synthétiques récapitulant les indispensables concepts/arguments de fonction/commandes abordés au cours des différentes sessions ElementR 2012-2013 (manipulation de données, ggplot2) et 2014-2015 (Markdown, construction de packages, Shiny)

Mapping urban shrinkage in Europe. Training School Final Report. EU-COST Action TU0803

In the context of the European COST Action ‘Cities Regrowing Smaller’ (CIRES) a training was held in Dortmund, Germany from November 14th to 18th in 2011. The training school ‘Mapping Urban Shrinkage’ aimed to get young researchers and scholars from different European countries together to deal with questions of how to measure and illustrate shrinkag