Publications

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, we empirically estimate commuting patterns for 115 Canadian urban areas. 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 nontrivial 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