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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
As urban land increased in mainland Portugal by 55.9% between 1990 and
2012 and the country developed an extensive motorway network between the
1980s and the early 2010s, we set out to investigate the effect of motorways
on urban sprawl across mainland municipalities. We document the evolution
of urban sprawl for these 275 municipalities across several dimensions,
including the population density of urban land, its degree of fragmentation
and shape irregularity (which we combine in a summary “total interface”
indicator), and the differences between the central urban unit and the
remaining “peripheral” urban land. Given that the spatial distribution of
motorways is likely to be endogenous, we use road itineraries from the 18th
century as an instrumental variable. Our results suggest that motorways
contributed to the fragmentation of urban land into numerous urban patches.
Also, we identify important within-municipality heterogenous effects, in that
motorways did not cause the contiguous growth of the central urban unit
(typically the largest urban unit in each municipality) but, conversely,
appeared to contribute in a significant manner to the development of
peripheral urban land. There is also some evidence that motorways
contributed to an increase in the shape irregularity of urban areas. Finally, we
show that motorways caused a decrease in urban population density, but only
in the relatively small group of more urbanised municipalities.
Description
Keywords
Urban sprawl Urban land Urban fragmentation Motorways Transport accessibility Instrumental variables Portugal
Pedagogical Context
Citation
Rocha, Bruno T. ...[et al.] (2025). "The heterogeneous effects of motorways on urban sprawl: causal evidence from Portugal". REM Working paper series, nº 0380/2025
Publisher
ISEG - REM (Research in Economics and Mathematics)