Understanding the spatial employment distribution in Barcelona Metropolitan Area

Abstract

The spatial distribution of population, economic activity and income is important for public policies and the provision of public goods in cities. Understanding how employment is distributed in space has become a main factor when analysing the urban structure of a certain area/region. There has been a traditional lack of data on the spatial distribution of employment in Spain, and therefore, Catalonia. This project aimed to address this data gap by geocoding Catalan companies using different geocoders and techniques to obtain the first companies’ geocoded data frame of Catalonia. It has revealed how geocoding process can be complex and the importance of having a clean and well-structured dataset before processing. Furthermore, to get a better understanding of the employment distribution in the BMA, the project has joined the employment data with socioeconomic data from census tracts. Global Moran’s I and LISA analyses have been performed to comprehend the employment distribution with its most significant working clusters. While this research has been the initial step to accurately understand the employment distribution in the BMA, several tools have been provided that help to perform similar analysis and get significant and comparable results for more precise sectoral employment classifications. These calculations can be done alongside with the definition of the employment urban models: monocentric or polycentric.