Modern urban landscapes are characterized by the progressive separation of the location of jobs, houses and amenities, which inexorably leads to the increase of urban travel and transit. This is the beginning point for some recent research programs in regional economics (Krugman, 1991 ; Glaeser, 1992 ; Henderson, 1997 ; Gabaix, 1999 ; Dobkins et Ioannides, 2000) which adopt a new line of reasoning based on the study of the commuting trips that characterise contemporary urban life. Different aspects of these trips, such as the volume, the pathways and the travel modes of the commuters, are examined with regard to mass transport, local public services and the increasing diversification of rural and urban amenities. This allows one to explore some original aspects of the recent transformations in both modern cities organisation and regional urban hierarchies and, by the way, identify institutional and policy responses to new urban problems such as traffic congestion or residential segregation (Brueckner, Thisse and Zenou, 2002 ; Mauer and Ott, 1999). However, instead of trying to define a general households’ residential model, it seems then more appropriate to investigate the relationship between a given urban organisation and its regional macro-economic environment (Gabaix, 1999 ; Axtell and Florida, 2000). This point of view defend the hypothesis of a principle of structural dependence involving the action of long-term macroeconomic effects on the puzzling geometry of an urban economy (Marsili and Zhang, 1998 ; Simpson, 2000). By studying the case of La Reunion, this paper aims to study how insularity affects the locational choices of firms and households and their impact on regional urban hierarchies.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by European Regional Science Association in its series ERSA conference papers with number
ersa06p52.