Spatial and Commuting Networks

A wide literature is devoted to the study of the relevance of space, encompassing several fields and disciplines, such as geography, economics, epidemiology, environmental and regional sciences. For example, space-time modelling has been a relevant focus of research in spatial economics starting from Hagerstrand (1967) and Wilson (1967, 1970). While the former paid attention to the modelling of spatial diffusion phenomena, the latter unified movements of spatial flows under the umbrella of statistical and information theory, by means of spatial interaction models. In these models, the relevance of spatial structure emerged in the associated cost/impedance functions. In parallel, starting from Zipf (1932) and Simon (1955), the importance of spatial structures (homogeneous or heterogeneous) has been discussed extensively in the literature, by focusing on the relationships between urban growth, agglomeration economies, and commuting costs (see, among others, Krugman 1991; Rossi-Hansberg and Wright 2006). A point of concern is that, in these spatial (growth and interaction) models, the effects of spatial topology and connectivity are only implicitly included, but never explicitly considered and discussed.