Events

Urbanisation from a global perspective: Are towns urban or rural?

Hosted by the Cañada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies

Online and in-person public event (SAL.G.03, Sir Arthur Lewis Building), United Kingdom

Speaker

Dr. Lewis Dijkstra

Dr. Lewis Dijkstra

Head of the Economic Analysis of the DG for Regional and Urban Policy in the European Commission

Chair

Andrés Rodriguez-Pose

Andrés Rodriguez-Pose

Professor of Economic Geography, Princesa de Asturias Chair and Director Cañada Blanch Centre, LSE

Lewis Dijkstra takes the LSE stage again to share his insights on population growth and stresses the role of natural change as the dominant source of urban growth when using a harmonised definition of urban dwellings (which accounts for reclassification).

Many studies acknowledge that national definitions of urban areas are not harmonised, but assume that they are similar enough that they can be combined. This presentation shows that national definitions radically disagree whether towns should be classified as urban or rural. This difference is far from marginal, but leads to fundamentally different conclusions about past and future urbanisation. For example, using a harmonised definition of urbanisation, called the Degree of Urbanisation, reveals a weaker link between the urban population share and economic development or structural transformation. It also leads to radically different projections of urban population and urban land. Projections based on national definitions or a building-based definition come to far higher projections of changes in urban population and land as compared to projections based on the Degree of Urbanisation. Lastly, using the Degree of Urbanisation we can decompose urban population growth into natural change, net-migration and reclassification. This shows that natural change is the dominant source of urban population growth followed by reclassification while migration plays the smallest role. In short, using a harmonised definition challenges many of the long held assumptions and predictions about urbanisation and encourage us to reconsider many policy recommendations.

 

Meet our speaker

Dr. Lewis Dijkstra (@DijkstraLewis) is the Head of the Economic Analysis Sector of the Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy in the European Commission. He is the editor the Cohesion Report, which analyses economic, social and environmental issues in EU regions and cities. He is also a visiting professor at the London School of Economics.

He works closely with the OECD, the UN, the World Bank, the European Environmental Agency, the Joint Research Centre and Eurostat. His recent work covers topics such as a global definition of cities and rural areas, measuring transport performance, the geography of EU discontent, quality of government and gender equality.

He holds a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning from Rutgers University, New Jersey, an MSc in Urban and Regional Planning from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a BA in Political Science from the University of Ghent, Belgium.

 

Meet our chair

Andrés Rodríguez-Pose is the Princesa de Asturias Chair and Professor of Economic Geography at LSE. He is the Director of the Cañada Blanch Centre LSE. He is a former head of the Department of Geography and Environment between 2006 and 2009. He is a past-president of the Regional Science Association International (2015-2017) and served as Vice-President of the RSAI in 2014. He was also Vice-President (2012-2013) and Secretary (2001-2005) of the European Regional Science Association.

 

More about this event

The Cañada-Blanch Centre at LSE is the vehicle to achieve the objective of the Fundación Cañada Blanch: developing and reinforcing the links between the United Kingdom and Spain. This is done by means of fostering cutting-edge knowledge generation and joint research projects between researchers in the United Kingdom, and at the LSE in particular, on the one hand, and Spain, on the other.

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