The Structure of Sprawl: Identifying and Characterizing Employment Centers in Polycentric Metropolitan Areas

Abstract

This paper applies a consistent framework to four comparably sized metropolitan areas to identify and characterize their employment centers. Employment centers are identified as places that exceed a threshold employment density and a threshold employment level. They are also characterized as specializing on the basis of location quotient analysis. We find clear evidence of specialization in every employment center in the four metropolitan areas studied. Our interpretation is that what we are observing is a systematic change in metropolitan structure rather than a random sprawling of firms. We also find some evidence that the size distribution of employment centers follows the rank-size rule. This suggests that there is structure not only in the distribution of economic activity among the employment centers but also in their size distribution. Because less than 50 percent of metropolitan employment is within employment centers, future research should focus on understanding the more diffuse employment patterns. The rank-size rule gives some guidance as to the expected size distribution of employment throughout the metropolitan area.

Strangers in our midst: the usefulness of exploring polycentricity

“…Indeed, centers roughly follow a rank size distribution akin to cities in a region. Anderson and Bogart (2001) report the same finding for centers in both Cleveland and Indianapolis.…”

“…If some agglomeration economies are local, we should expect industry mix inside and outside of centers to be different, and that larger centers show more specialization in industries that are traditionally associated with agglomeration. There is evidence of specialization for Los Angeles employment centers (Giuliano and Small 1991), Los Angeles manufacturing centers (Funderburgh and Boarnet 2008), and for employment centers in Cleveland, Indianapolis, Portland, and St. Louis (Anderson and Bogart 2001). Table 4 shows 2-digit level industry sector shares for the CBD, the five largest centers, all employment inside centers, all employment outside centers, and the CMSA totals.…”

Do high technology agglomerations encourage urban sprawl?

“…For our purposes however, the intra-metropolitan behavior of high tech industries is of more significance. New suburban employment clusters within the orbit of the metropolitan area have been recognized as major components of the polycentric city (McDonald 1987;Giuliano and Small 1991;Anderson and Bogart 2001). These new agglomerations invariably cause pressure on land and housing markets via the redesignation of land uses, the incorporation of unincorporated land, annexations and the like.…”

Big data for intrametropolitan human movement studies

“…We cannot replicate the approaches in existing studies such as Giuliano and Small (1991) or Anderson and Bogart (2001) to identifying those centers because those approaches deal with all workers. Thus, their proposed thresholds for the total number of employment and density of employment would not be applicable to our case study.…”