Abstract
This paper focuses on the urban agglomerations and their effects on the spatial structure of the individual cities. An urban agglomeration implies the existence of strong socio-spatial relationships between nearby cities and complementarity between activities (housing, employment, study, services, among others). The objective of this paper is to present a methodology for the analysis of the probable effects of attractiveness between agglomerated cities, in intra-urban and regional scales. The article specifically focuses on the housing-consumption relationship and takes three agglomerated cities in the region of Serra Gaúcha (Bento Gonçalves, Garibaldi and Carlos Barbosa) as an empirical study. The paper applies a quantitative approach based on urban configurational models. The three cities are represented as a spatial system enabling the analysis of two scenarios: individual cities and the unified system. The Polarity model is used as an indicator of the relative attractiveness, inferring a certain type of complementarity between urban space units. The methodology enabled the comparison between the scenarios, providing a first measure of the spatial hierarchy generated for the consumption among the cities. The conclusions seek to highlight the potentialities and limits of the presented methodology.
Keywords:
Urban agglomeration; Configurational models; Retail and services; Impacts