IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/envirb/v51y2024i9p2126-2145.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The scalar mismatch of regional governance: A comparative analysis of hierarchical structures

Author

Listed:
  • Valentina Marin
  • Carlos Molinero
  • Elsa Arcaute

Abstract

Self-organisation in territories leads to the emergence of patterns in urban systems that shape the interactions and dependencies between cities, resulting in a hierarchical organisation. Governance follows a hierarchical structure as well, breaking the territory into smaller units for its management. The possible mismatch between these two organisations may lead to a range of problems, ranging from inefficiencies to insufficient and uneven distribution of resources. This paper seeks to develop a methodology to explore and quantify the correspondence between the hierarchical organisation given by the structure of governance and that given by the structure of the urban systems being governed, where Chile is used as a case study. The urban hierarchical structure is defined according to the connectivity of the system given by the road network. This is extracted through a clustering algorithm defined as a percolation process on the Chilean street network, giving rise to urban clusters at different scales. These are then compared to the spatial scales of the politico-administrative system. This is achieved by using measures of pair-wise distance similarity on the dendrograms, such as the cophenetic distance, by looking at the different clustering membership using Jaccard similarity and by analysing the topological diversity defined as the structural entropy. The results show that the urban sub-national structures present high heterogeneity, while the administrative system is highly homogeneous, replicating the same structure of organisation across the national territory. Such contrasting organisational structures present administrative challenges that can give rise to poor decision-making processes and mismanagement, in addition to impairing the efficient functioning of the systems themselves. Our results can help address these challenges, informing how to rebalance such mismatches through planning and political strategies that consider the complex interdependencies of territories across scales.

Suggested Citation

  • Valentina Marin & Carlos Molinero & Elsa Arcaute, 2024. "The scalar mismatch of regional governance: A comparative analysis of hierarchical structures," Environment and Planning B, , vol. 51(9), pages 2126-2145, November.
  • Handle: RePEc:sae:envirb:v:51:y:2024:i:9:p:2126-2145
    DOI: 10.1177/23998083241234405
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23998083241234405
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/23998083241234405?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Hernán D. Rozenfeld & Diego Rybski & Xavier Gabaix & Hernán A. Makse, 2011. "The Area and Population of Cities: New Insights from a Different Perspective on Cities," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(5), pages 2205-2225, August.
    2. Fischer, Manfred M., 1980. "Regional taxonomy : A comparison of some hierarchic and non-hierarchic strategies," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 10(4), pages 503-537, November.
    3. Stephen Marshall & Jorge Gil & Karl Kropf & Martin Tomko & Lucas Figueiredo, 2018. "Street Network Studies: from Networks to Models and their Representations," Networks and Spatial Economics, Springer, vol. 18(3), pages 735-749, September.
    4. Ray Hudson, 2007. "Regions and Regional Uneven Development Forever? Some Reflective Comments upon Theory and Practice," Regional Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 41(9), pages 1149-1160.
    5. Duccio Piovani & Carlos Molinero & Alan Wilson, 2017. "Urban retail location: Insights from percolation theory and spatial interaction modeling," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 12(10), pages 1-13, October.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Michael Peneder, 2003. "Industry Classifications: Aim, Scope and Techniques," Journal of Industry, Competition and Trade, Springer, vol. 3(1), pages 109-129, March.
    2. Rafael González-Val & Arturo Ramos & Fernando Sanz-Gracia & María Vera-Cabello, 2015. "Size distributions for all cities: Which one is best?," Papers in Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 94(1), pages 177-196, March.
    3. de Bellefon, Marie-Pierre & Combes, Pierre-Philippe & Duranton, Gilles & Gobillon, Laurent & Gorin, Clément, 2021. "Delineating urban areas using building density," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 125(C).
    4. Dimitrios TSIOTAS & Nikolaos AXELIS & Serafeim POLYZOS, 2022. "Detecting City-Dipoles In Greece Based On Intercity Commuting," Regional Science Inquiry, Hellenic Association of Regional Scientists, vol. 0(1), pages 11-30, June.
    5. Bala, Alain Pholo & Peeters, Dominique & Thomas, Isabelle, 2014. "Spatial issues on a hedonic estimation of rents in Brussels," Journal of Housing Economics, Elsevier, vol. 25(C), pages 104-123.
    6. Xiaobo Su, 2013. "From Frontier to Bridgehead: Cross-border Regions and the Experience of Yunnan, China," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 37(4), pages 1213-1232, July.
    7. Diana Gutiérrez Posada & Fernando Rubiera Morollón & Ana Viñuela, 2018. "Ageing Places in an Ageing Country: The Local Dynamics of the Elderly Population in Spain," Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG, vol. 109(3), pages 332-349, July.
    8. Massing, Till & Puente-Ajovín, Miguel & Ramos, Arturo, 2020. "On the parametric description of log-growth rates of cities’ sizes of four European countries and the USA," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 551(C).
    9. Dingel, Jonathan I. & Miscio, Antonio & Davis, Donald R., 2021. "Cities, lights, and skills in developing economies," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 125(C).
    10. Yousef Ahmad El Dameh & Hamad AL Ghadeer, 2021. "The Impact of Traditional Direct Marketing on Creating Brand Awareness: Case Study on IKEA in Jordan," International Journal of Business and Management, Canadian Center of Science and Education, vol. 14(3), pages 130-130, July.
    11. Pengfei Ban & Wei Zhan & Qifeng Yuan & Xiaojian Li, 2021. "Delineating the Urban Areas of a Cross-Boundary City with Open-Access Data: Guangzhou–Foshan, South China," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(5), pages 1-17, March.
    12. Duranton, Gilles & Puga, Diego, 2014. "The Growth of Cities," Handbook of Economic Growth, in: Philippe Aghion & Steven Durlauf (ed.), Handbook of Economic Growth, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 5, pages 781-853, Elsevier.
    13. Rémi Lemoy & Geoffrey Caruso, 2020. "Evidence for the homothetic scaling of urban forms," Environment and Planning B, , vol. 47(5), pages 870-888, June.
    14. Gilberto Seravalli, 2016. "Dimensioni e crescita delle citt? in Europa: l?incertezza danneggia soprattutto le citt? medie," SCIENZE REGIONALI, FrancoAngeli Editore, vol. 2016(2), pages 91-108.
    15. Sen, Hu & Chunxia, Yang & Xueshuai, Zhu & Zhilai, Zheng & Ya, Cao, 2015. "Distributions of region size and GDP and their relation," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 430(C), pages 46-56.
    16. Patrick Erik Bradley & Martin Behnisch, 2019. "Heavy-tailed distributions for building stock data," Environment and Planning B, , vol. 46(7), pages 1281-1296, September.
    17. Davide Luca, 2022. "National elections, sub-national growth: the politics of Turkey’s provincial economic dynamics under AKP rule [Shift-share designs: theory and inference]," Journal of Economic Geography, Oxford University Press, vol. 22(4), pages 829-851.
    18. Ramos, Arturo, 2019. "Addenda to “Are the log-growth rates of city sizes distributed normally? Empirical evidence for the USA [Empir. Econ. (2017) 53:1109-1123]”," MPRA Paper 93032, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    19. Arturo, Ramos, 2019. "Have the log-population processes stationary and independent increments? Empirical evidence for Italy, Spain and the USA along more than a century," MPRA Paper 93562, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    20. Galdo, Virgilio & Li, Yue & Rama, Martin, 2021. "Identifying urban areas by combining human judgment and machine learning: An application to India," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 125(C).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:envirb:v:51:y:2024:i:9:p:2126-2145. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.