Settlement formation

Abstract

The dynamic process of settlement formation is a fundamental issue in regional science. Our proposed model integrates the economic and migratory sectors in terms of endogenous variables in order to describe the evolution of continuous population distributions as a self-organising process. The model has been designed as follows: an ensemble of populations is described by the respective population densities over the plane, with the latter being tessellated into equivalent unit cells. Populations produce commodities and the net incomes of the individuals depend on local production costs, including fixed costs and the transportation costs from production to consumption place. Therefore, these local incomes depend on the population densities. The economy is assumed to be in a momentary quasi-equilibrium with the population distribution, and the evolution of the population distribution is described by non-linear migratory equations of motion. The driving forces within these equations are local differences in individual incomes. These motivate the individuals to migrate to locations of optimal income. This process leads to the evolution of spatially heterogeneous population distributions forming the settlements.