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New Spatial Mobility Patterns in Large Spanish Cities: from the Economic Boom to the Great Recession

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Abstract

Until 2008—the beginning of the economic crisis—Spanish metropolitan areas were characterised by relatively high residential mobility, suburbanisation, and urban sprawl. Municipalities situated farthest away from the core cities were the areas that were expanding more rapidly, while urban cores were losing native population that was being replaced by foreign immigrants. All these features presumably changed when the Great Recession hit the Spanish economy and the housing bubble burst. Using two INE (Spanish National Statistical Institute) data sources, the Padrón, or local register, and the Estadística de Variaciones Residenciales, or residential moves statistics, this paper studies changing trends in residential mobility and migration between 1999 and 2012 in Spain, focusing on the country’s main urban areas: Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, and Seville. In particular, internal migration patterns during the economic expansion and crisis periods are compared. Despite the fact that high unemployment since 2008 has certainly affected pre-crisis trends, results show that residential mobility has decreased much less than expected. Nevertheless, territorial patterns have changed and are now much less polarised. Urban cores and inner-ring towns, which had previously been losing inhabitants because of people moving to outer-ring areas, are now losing less native population. By contrast, suburban municipalities, which had been the most attractive to internal migrants during the economic growth period, are now much less appealing, as corroborated by the fact that practically no new housing is being built in these areas and their housing market has plummeted.

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Notes

  1. Bover and Arellano (2002) include factors for low interprovincial migration within Spain such as differences in education levels (i.e., highly qualified workers tend to migrate more than less qualified workers), high housing prices in conjunction with a low supply of rented dwellings, and increased employment opportunities in the service sector in all regions since the late 1970s. Similarly, Paluzie et al. (2009) explain that the loss of importance of the industrial sector in attracting migratory flows and the increasing importance of the service sector (which is more spatially disperse and in turn favours short-distance, rather than interprovincial, moves) have caused a change in the migratory model and its spatial distribution, which is not as concentrated as it was during the main period of industrialisation in the middle of the twentieth century. As a consequence of this increasing spatial dispersion of emigration and immigration, the growth in the gross number of migrations during the most recent phase of economic expansion (mid-1990s to 2008) was not accompanied by an increase in net migration (Ródenas and Martí 2005).

  2. The spatial assimilation theory states that foreign-born immigrants ultimately disperse from early settlement places in the host country—in which members of the same ethnic or national group tend to cluster—to less segregated locations. This process of avoiding residing in ethnic concentrations is in parallel with immigrants’ socio-economic advancement and with their creation of ties with the host country, potentially resulting in their separation from the same origin group and their acculturation (Silvestre and Reher 2014: 52). This theory has been challenged by the segmented assimilation theory (Portes and Zhou 1993), which posits that diverse immigrant groups may assimilate within different types of locations and places, and by the ethnic enclave theory (Bolt and Van Kempen 2010), which argues that immigrants—even those who achieve socio-economic success—may prefer to remain in (or to move to) ethnic enclaves, where they obtain benefits from social networks (Silvestre and Reher 2014).

  3. Kabish and Haase (2011) have applied the classical cyclical urbanisation model to recent European developments and claim that since 2001, this continent’s urban areas are undergoing several stages at a time and that, therefore, phases would not be succeeding one another anymore. Moreover, they observed that European-level regional trends would appear. Deurbanisation would dominate Eastern Europe, while suburbanisation would still be the most important phenomenon in the rest of the continent, where reurbanisation processes would also become increasingly relevant.

  4. By contrast, interprovincial or inter-regional migrations have reduced in intensity and have changed their directions; these flows are now more balanced. Minondo et al. (2013) point out that there has been a change in the sending and receiving regions because of Spanish regions’ differing responses to the economic crisis: those areas less affected are now receiving migrants, whereas those more affected are losing them (see also Gil-Alonso et al. 2015).

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Acknowledgements

This research was carried out under the R&D project “Desigualdad social, polarización territorial y formación de espacios vulnerables en las grandes áreas metropolitanas españolas" (CSO2015-65219-C2-1-R, MINECO/FEDER, UE), directed by Dr. Isabel Pujadas and Dr. Fernando Gil-Alonso, and financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and by FEDER (EU). All of the authors of this article are members of the Territory, Population and Citizenship Research Group (GRC_2014SGR380), also directed by Dr. Isabel Pujadas. We would also like to thank Eva Jiménez-Julià and Joanna Freedman for their translation and revision work and the four external reviewers for their comments.

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  1. Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics and Geography Department, University of Barcelona, Facultat de Geografia i Història, C/. Montalegre, 6-8, 08001, Barcelona, Spain

    Jordi Bayona-i-Carrasco

  2. Geography Department, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Fernando Gil-Alonso, Miguel Rubiales-Pérez & Isabel Pujadas-Rúbies

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  1. Jordi Bayona-i-Carrasco
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Bayona-i-Carrasco, J., Gil-Alonso, F., Rubiales-Pérez, M. et al. New Spatial Mobility Patterns in Large Spanish Cities: from the Economic Boom to the Great Recession. Appl. Spatial Analysis 11, 287–312 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12061-017-9222-x

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