Resumen de Modelling functional area and commuting flows

Oscar Mascarilla Miró, Yuri Yegorov

• Traditionally large cities had also concentrated significant economic, social and demographic power due to economies of agglomeration. This article presents a hypothesis about modification of these economies by new technologies of information and communication, which change spatial coordinates and diminish the role of distance.

  This paper presents an economic analysis of residential location of economic agents, with a special attention paid to urban dispersion. The paper derives the attractiveness of a city as the function of its population and studies the equilibrium split of population across cities. The main goal is to explain price formation and urban dispersion through production structure and wages determined by sizes and relative location of cities. The results show that different neighbouring municipalities become economically interrelated, and we need to shift our attention to a new spatial object of analysis �functional urban areas, which is a product of spatial aggregation of municipalities with respect to housing and labour markets. It implies also a policy change which should take into account this interdependence of neighbouring markets.

  For example, NUTS-III in the European Community should be replaced by functional areas.