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Spatial Analysis of the Urban-to-Rural Migration Determinants in the Viennese Metropolitan Area. A Transition from Suburbia to Postsuburbia?

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Abstract

Currently urban spatial structures are affected by pervasive developments, which provoke a diversity and reorganization of population. This article examines the driving forces that cause urban-to-rural migration of population in the Austrian metropolitan area of Vienna using exploratory spatial analysis methods over the time period from 2001 to 2006. To model the qualitative changes between sub- and postsuburban processes, fuzzy sets are applied as variables. Because of significant concentration of high urban-to-rural migration along the main transportation corridors, a geographically weighted regression approach is used to determine whether suburban or postsuburban determinants are essential to predict urban-to-rural migration. The results show that the spatial variation of urban-to-rural migration can be statistically best modeled by using the two covariates “good accessibility to the core city by motorized individual transport” and a “high land price index”. The article argues that this represents the prominence of classical hard location factors, which are interpreted as typical suburban. Accordingly, the metropolitan area is—concerning urban-to-rural migration—still under the influence of suburban processes.

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Notes

  1. A Google Scholar search conforms this: 21,900 entries for the term “suburbanization” and only 14 entries for the terms “postsuburbanization” or “post-suburbanization” (last accessed Jan 8 2009).

  2. Garreau (1992) defined Edge Cities as centers with more than 5 million square feet of office space, 603,000 square feet of retail space and 24,000 employees. Further characteristics are that Edge Cities emerged during the last 20 or 30 years, that they are perceived by the population as one place and that they have a commuter surplus due to a high concentration of jobs.

  3. Statistics Austria http://www.statistik.at/web_en/ (last accessed Nov 10 2008)

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by an Austrian Academy of Sciences grant. We would like to thank Heinz Fassmann and Josef Strobl for their valuable comments. We would also like to acknowledge the constructive comments and feedback from the reviewers. This paper was written during an academic leave of the first author in the Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, USA during fall semester 2008.

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Helbich, M., Leitner, M. Spatial Analysis of the Urban-to-Rural Migration Determinants in the Viennese Metropolitan Area. A Transition from Suburbia to Postsuburbia?. Appl. Spatial Analysis 2, 237–260 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12061-009-9026-8

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