Road accessibility and articulation of metropolitan spatial structures: the case of Madrid (Spain)

Abstract

In the last few decades, rapid growth in mobility has facilitated the inclusion of distant places in metropolitan processes and the modification of traditional metropolitan areas into Polycentric Urban Regions. This paper aims to understand the articulation of metropolitan urban regions through a diachronic road network accessibility analysis with a focus on the Madrid Metropolitan Region (Spain) over a period of general increase in accessibility. The findings reveal that the metropolitan core has been reinforced and that its influence area has expanded. However, the main contribution of this work is the proposal of a methodological approach to identify city-profiles among the sub-centres organising the emerging polycentric urban structures.

Urban subcentres in German city regions: Identification, understanding, comparison

“…Thus, German subcentres tend to be local spatial densifications of employment whose influence is masked by CBD dominance rather than mimicking ‘mini‐CBDs’. This finding holds for both the direct application of the LWR following McMillen and several modifications; it is also consistent with previous analyses for Germany (e.g., Knapp and Volgmann ; Krehl ) and for other European countries (e.g., Riguelle et al ; Adolphson ; Garcia‐López and Muñiz ; Martínez Sánchez‐Mateos et al ).…”

Impacts of High-Speed Rail on Metropolitan Integration: An Examination of London, Madrid and Paris

“…All three metropolitan regions have witnessed decentralization, multicentricity, and deindustrialization along with concurrent increases in their service economies. The number of commuters between these ex-metropolitan areas and the metropolitan centre was already high prior to the HSR (Preston and Wall 2008;Aguilera, Wenglenski, and Proulhac 2009;Martinez et al 2014). …”

“…Thanks to accessibility improvements, new metropolitan subcentres can emerge in metropolitan regions (Martinez et al 2014) fostering more complex and polycentric mobility patterns (Clark and Kuijpers-Linde 1994;Van der Laan 1998).…”

Regional polycentricity: an indicator framework for assessing cohesion impacts of railway infrastructures

“…Similarly, the recent study carried out by Martínez Sánchez-Mateos, Mohíno Sanz, Ureña Francés, and Solís Trapero (2014) provided a regional assessment methodology based on road network accessibility indicators in attention to travel times between nodes. Therefore, although the methodology is considered to be morphological, since accessibility is associated with internal characteristics of the entities (Burger & Meijers, 2012;Martínez Sánchez-Mateos et al, 2014), their results are highly comparable with those obtained by functional approaches and then can be assumed as 'a proxy to interpret the urban network and the potential for spatial integration'.…”