Hacia un modelo de aglomeración y desaglomeración del espacio regional urbano, Kugman revisitado

Abstract

The object of this paper is directed towards investigating the effects of the economies of agglomeration and disagglomeration in the regional-urban space that led firstly to the emergence, throughout the 19th Century and first half of the 20th Century, of the metropolises of concentrated urbanisation, as well as later, in more advanced stages of the 20th Century, to what has come to be called “contraurbanisation”, “desurbanisation” or the “diffuse city”. With this end in mind, the self-organizing model proposed by Krugman (1996) is discussed, in order to explain the phenomenon of the “edge cities”, as well as setting out a complementary essay, with the intention of explaining the two-fold phenomenon concentrationdispersion that currently characterises the metropolitan areas of the developed world The paper concludes with an empirical exercise through the application of the model developed to the specific concrete reality of the metropolitan territory of Barcelona.