Urban Footprints in Rural Canada: Employment Spillovers by City Size

ALI K., OLFERT M. R. and PARTRIDGE M. D. Urban footprints in rural Canada: employment spillovers by city size, Regional Studies. Growing rural-to-urban commuting epitomizes a de facto regionalization process that is unique for each urban area and its spatial setting. In evaluating these relationships, commuting patterns for 115 Canadian urban areas are estimated empirically. A novel weighted-averaging process reveals a rich spatial pattern that illustrates significant heterogeneity attributable to differences in urban size and to geographical diversity. Strong distance attenuation effects exhibit non-trivial variations in their intensity and geographic reach across the country. The general patterns are consistent with urban hierarchy notions of functional regions that both compete with and overlap one another. Governance and infrastructure planning would benefit from understanding these interdependencies.