The fluctuating record of economic regeneration in England's second-order city regions, 1984-2007

This study examines how far and in what way ‘Our cities are back’, as claimed by England’s Core Cities Group. It focuses on 1984-2007 employment changes for the eight Core Cities and their city regions: Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield. City regions are defined on a consistent functional basis and allowance is made for discontinuities in the jobs time-series. These provincial city regions are found to have suffered relatively less than London in the early 1990s recession, but then recovered more slowly to achieve their greatest rates of growth in 1998- 2002 and only then did the Core Cities outpace the rest of their city regions. Employment growth slowed after this, though their population recovery continued

The complexity of urban systems: contrasts and similarities from different regions

"The primary focus of the paper is on trends in population distribution and migration, together with a discussion of the underlying processes and an evaluation of the various models and perspectives which have been advanced in the literature.The paper proceeds through three levels of detail. First, at the international level, it compares changing levels of urbanisation in terms of the traditional measure of the proportion of people living in urban places. Second, it examines trends in the intensity of urbanisation, measured in terms of the degree of concentration in a small number of large urban centres and related to processes of polarisation and counter-urbanisation. Third, it investigates the nature and patterns of urban change at the more localised scale of the individual urban region. At each level, the paper highlights conceptual and methodological issues raised by the developments observed, not least what they mean for the definition of 'urban' and 'rural' places and for the monitoring of trends in urbanisation and urban system change.." - page

Back where they started?

Posted by Prof Tony Champion, SERC and CURDS, Newcastle University Most people agree that our big cities have had a pretty good 90s and 00s. In the past two decades, big cities like Manchester and Liverpool have had a physical makeover and have seen employment and jobs growth

Updating Ravenstein: Internal Migration as a Driver of Regional Population Change in the Wider South East of England

Key among Ravenstein's "laws", derived from extensive analysis of mid-19th century migration patterns in the British Isles, are that the majority of migrants go only a short distance and that migration proceeds stepwise as a sequence of localised population shifts towards the principal centres of commerce and industry. This paper tests these two laws in the 21st century context of counterurbanisation by reference to migration taking place within the Wider South East (WSE) of England, being the region dominated by deconcentration pressures emanating from London. It comprises two sets of empirical analyses using migration data for the period 2001-2016. Firstly, these data are aggregated to a set of broadly concentric rings around this core and analysed to reveal how much of the net outward shifts of population produced by this migration arises from net movement taking place between adjacent rings as a type of cascade as opposed to leapfrogging directly from the core into a non-adjacent ring. Cascading is found to predominate at this scale, confirming the continued importance of shorter-distance moving. Secondly, the migration data are rendered into a Travel to Work Area (TTWA) framework to examine the extent to which these subdivisions of the WSE perform a type of entrepôt role in helping to shift population outwards from London. Drawing on Ravenstein’s concepts of counties of "transfer" and "absorption", two measures are developed for revealing how the net inflow to a particular TTWA from rings closer to the core compares numerically with the net outflow from that TTWA to the rings further away from it. The derived transfer and absorption rates are then used to classify the TTWAs into four groups according to whether their scores on each are above or below average. It is found that a TTWA's role varies according to two main dimensions: the concentric zone to which it belongs and the radial sector out of London in which it is located, notably whether the sector has a coastal or landward border

Is internal migration slowing? An analysis of four decades of NHSCR records for England and Wales

This paper is prompted by the widespread acceptance that the rates of inter-county and inter-state migration have been falling in the USA and sets itself the task of examining whether this decline in migration intensities is also the case in the UK. It uses the inter-area migration matrices available for England and Wales from the National Health Service Central Register (NHSCR) which provides continuous monitoring since the 1970s by broad age group. The main methodological challenge, arising from changes in the geography of health areas for which the inter-area flows are given, is addressed by adopting the lowest common denominator of 80 areas. Care is also taken to allow for the effect of business cycles in producing short-term fluctuations on migration rates and to isolate the effect of a sharp rise in rates for 16-24 year olds in the 1990s, which is presumed to be related to the expansion of the university sector. The findings suggest that, unlike for the USA, there has not been a substantial decline in the intensity of internal migration between the first two decades of the study period and the second two. While there was a 3 per cent reduction in the overall rate of migration between the regions of England and Wales between 1975-1990 and 1996-2011 (omitting the 16-24s), the rate for within-region moves between areas was some 10 per cent higher in the latter period. The main evidence for decline relates to particular age groups of between-region migration, where the rate for those aged 65 and over shrank by a quarter and that for 0-15 year olds was down by a tenth. In general, however, if there has been any major decline in the intensity of address changing in England and Wales, it can only be for the shortest-distance (within area) moves that the NHSCR does not record

Is Pennine England becoming more Polycentric or more Centripetal? an analysis of commuting flows in a transforming industrial region, 1981-2001

This paper examines census-derived commuting data for the world’s earliest major urbanindustrial region, now home to 10 million people. Owing its origins to water power from the Pennine rivers, this region now comprises many closely-spaced cities and towns whose distinct identities have been eroded through the loss of their local industrial specialisms and the long-term growth in mobility. It contains five of the city regions identified by ‘The Northern Way’, a policy initiative designed as part of the Labour government’s 2004 Sustainable Cities Plan for stimulating agglomeration economies across the wider region, with a more polycentric structure being seen as a positive contribution to this development. The paper tests how far this part of Northern England may be evolving into a single polycentric mega-city region, using commuting data from the 1981, 1991 and 2001 Censuses. Two hypotheses are tested; namely, that there is increasing polycentricity within each of the five city regions and that there is increasing linkage between the five city regions. With gravity modelling removing the effects of generic reductions in distance deterrence, evidence is found of trends towards greater polycentricity at both these scales of analysis, albeit modest in scale: there has been some reduction in the five cities’ attraction of commuters living in the other parts of their city regions and the boundaries between the city regions have become somewhat more permeable over time

Great Britain's second-order city regions in recessions, 1978-2010

While it is now accepted that the 2008-09 recession accentuated regional differences in Britain, it is more difficult to identify the role of major cities, especially over a longer time scale. Using previously established methods focussed on employment, this paper assesses the record of nine city regions in the 2008-09 recession, both in its own right and in comparison with the previous two recessions. The 2008-09 recession is found to have impacted the nine city regions less than the previous ones in absolute terms but not in relative terms compared with the London city region or the rest of Britain. Over the whole period from 1978, the paper has found the city regions to be fairly tightly in the grip of national cyclical trends of recession and recovery, but generally performing less resiliently than Britain as a whole. In comparison, London showed appreciably more cyclical behaviour between 1989 and 2002 than at other times, with the most remarkable recovery from recession in this period. The public sector helped the performance of second-order city regions from 1997 to 2010, including the peak of growth rates in city regions and their cores in 1998-2002, but its employment reductions will dominate the prospects for provincial cities for several years to come

Are people moving home less? An analysis of address changing in England and Wales, 1971-2011, using the ONS longitudinal study

Expectations of migration and mobility steadily increasing in the longer term, which have a long currency in migration theory and related social science, are at odds with the latest US research showing a marked decline in internal migration rates. Given the similarity in demographic, economic and social trends between the USA and the UK, this paper reports the results of research that investigates whether the latter has been experienced any similar change in more recent decades. Using the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study (ONS-LS) of linked census records, it examines the evidence provided by its 10-year migration indicator, with particular attention to a comparison of the first and latest decades available, 1971-1981 and 2001-2011. This suggests that, as in the USA, there has been a marked reduction in the level of shorter-distance (less than 10km) moving that has involved almost all types of people. In contrast to this and to US experience, however, the propensity of people to make longer-distance address changes between decennial censuses has declined much less, though the 2.6% fall between the 1970s and the 2000s may be an underestimate owing to the inclusion of moves to and from university in the latest decade. This finding is consistent with the results of a companion study which analysed data on migration between the health areas of England and Wales (Champion and Shuttleworth, 2015). There is therefore a strong case for now probing the causes of the sharp reduction in shorter-distance moving in Britain as well as the USA, as well as for investigating why the two countries differ in terms of their experience of longer-distance migration trends

Urban escalators and inter-regional elevators: the difference that location, mobility and sectoral specialisation make to occupational progression

This paper uses evidence from the (British) Longitudinal Study to examine the influence on occupational advancement of the city-region of residence (an escalator effect) and of relocation between city-regions (an elevator effect). It shows both effects to be substantively important, though less so than the sector of employment. Elevator effects are found to be associated with moves from slacker to tighter regional labour markets. Escalator effects, on the other hand, are linked with residence in larger urban agglomerations, though not specifically London, but also across most of the Greater South East and in second/third order city-regions elsewhere. Sectoral escalator effects are found to be particularly strong in knowledge-intensive activities, with concentrations of these, as of other advanced job types (rather than of graduate labour), contributing strongly to the more dynamic city-regional escalators. The impact of the geographic effects is found to vary substantially with both observed and unobserved personal characteristics, being substantially stronger for the young and for those whose unobserved attributes (e.g. dynamic human capital) generally boost rates of occupational advance