Urbanisation beyond gravitation. An interdisciplinary approach to rural-urban relations.

This project answers to recent calls for approaches to urbanisation attuned to dynamic rural-urban relations. Current methods and models to understanding urbanisation are determined by an urban and rationalist bias, assuming the gravitational pull of the city, as well as being undifferentiated in how to relate transport connections to actual mobility practices and urbanisation. Models assume that access to transport equals more job opportunities, equals the choice to use transport, and thus results in an increase of mobility flows, leading in its turn to urbanisation. However, decisions to stay put in a rural village or to move to the city were, and are, far more complex than gravitational push-pull forces and rational choice models would predict. Hence, current approaches to urbanisation have weak empirical validity, with a low degree of explanation, especially for sprawled, highly networked areas. A major contribution of our project will be the design and corroboration of a new approach analysing and conceptualising urbanisation, from below. Extensive datasets of mobility practices (commuting and migration) in a long term perspective will allow to develop a geographic network analysis of relations between mobility and urbanisation, through dynamic and multi-directional networked movement. History and sociology will explain the differentiated relations between commuting, migration, and urbanisation, through analysing socio-economic dynamics and multiple logics that inform mobility practices and, indeed the choice to stay in place or migrate. In so doing, the project offers scientific breakthroughs in geography, history, sociology, and the broad domain of urban studies, as it develops an approach defining urbanisation by networked mobility practices, rather than by preconceived hierarchies between places and individual choices.

Keywords:NETWORK ANALYSIS, MOBILITY, QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS

Disciplines:Economic geography, Geography of mobility and transportation, Urban and regional geography, Social and cultural anthropology not elsewhere classified, Regional and urban history, Socio-economic history