Geography and embeddedness in city networks

This research assesses the empirical relevance of geography as a driver of the position of the nodes within a city network. We first propose a measure of the strength of network ties between municipalities based on the observed migratory flows and compute network centrality indexes to characterize the degree of embeddedness of each place. Second, we filter the network ties to account for the fact that a non-negligible fraction of the flows is induced by geographical proximity and, therefore, do not accurately measure the strength of the relationship between places. The empirical results (data from Spanish municipalities for the period 2001-16) suggest that network ties between municipalities, beyond those directly related to geographical proximity, explain, on average, about a third of network centrality.