Becoming more polycentric: public transport and location choices in the Munich Metropolitan Area

Abstract

The Munich Metropolitan Area (MMA) is embarking on becoming a more polycentric urban region. For long, the monocentric city model has provided strong explanatory power in understanding the location decisions of private households and firms. However, this model has been challenged by the emergence of large, polycentric city-regions. Increasing commute ranges and the spatial reorganization of economic activities show patterns of concentration and deconcentration at the same time but on different spatial scales. This paper gives an overview of and theorizing about the spatial driving forces and development within recent years. We use the interplay of agglomeration and network advantages to describe the spatial evolution of the MMA where new secondary centers emerge. Publicly available data and a large-scale web-survey provide the basis for descriptive and multivariate statistical analyses. We find–maybe not surprisingly that still the same driving forces of the monocentric city model–accessibility and economic competition–are at work: the MMA’s public transport rail network still forms a radial and monocentric system, while the present use of space by inhabitants shows an increasingly polycentric pattern with explicit tangential relations. We then discuss the future spatio-functional development path of the MMA by pitching the current strong population and employment growth with its tendency toward metropolisation against an alternative development path with competing driving forces. We conclude with visualizing and discussing the alternative spatial development that simultaneously projects concentration, deconcentration, and dispersion dynamics.