Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
level, and the city (
G
), smaller and only with industrial specialization. These
respond differently to the existence of economic barriers between the Eastern and
Western blocks. While the trajectory of the first city is not influenced by these
barriers, the second city is limited in its growth within the appropriate scenario.
Having multiple specializations, and hence being integrated in several exchange
networks, the first city (
L
) resists better to the “closure” scenario than the second
city (
G
) which is monospecialized. Such a difference in behavior corresponds to the
empirical observation, where cities with a diversified economic profile are often
more resilient, although no such rule has been explicitly introduced. A follow-up of
the different cities' exchange networks shows that cities respond differently to the
existence of economic barriers according to their size and economic specialisation.
The exchange networks of a large and multispecialized city tend to expand when
there are no economic barriers (which is consistent with the intuition) while the
opposite is true for the smaller and monospecialized cities that suffer greater
competition in this same situation.
Figure 4.9.
Demographic trajectories in reaction to
demographic and economic scenarios
Finally, at the level of the system of cities' structure, the simulations show that,
regardless of the set of parameters, the rank-size organization remains extremely
stable over time. Indeed, whether the immigration policies are favorable to a Europe
that is open or closed, or whether there are any constraints on economic exchanges
between the cities, the simulated hierarchical organization of the system of European
cities remains the same in the long-term.
The changes that emerge at the level of the global structure of the system are not
contained in the rules governing the interactions between the city-agents. This
stability in the rank-size organization reflects, as it has already been pointed out in
Chapter 3, the existence of different logics of exchanges that are inserted in a well-
integrated global system. The EuroSim model allows us to confirm the stability of
this structure at the level of the system of cities, while making it possible to identify
