Monica Brezzi

Assessing Polycentric Urban Systems in the OECD: Country, Regional and Metropolitan Perspectives

Abstract Contemporary urban systems in OECD countries are structured around functional regions, which often overcome established city-boundaries. Reading space in terms of functional regions allows assessing changes in urban hierarchies and spatial structures, including the polycentricity of urban systems at national, regional and metropolitan scales. By using a harmonized definition of functional urban areas in OECD countries, this paper first provides a sound definition of polycentricity at each spatial scale, highlighting for each of them the different links with policy. Second, it provides measures of polycentricity and explores the economic implications of different spatial structures. Results show that relatively more monocentric regions have higher GDP per capita than their more polycentric counterparts. At the country level, on the other hand, polycentricity is associated with higher GDP per capita.

A web-enabled Geovisual Analytics tool applied to OECD Regional Data

Recent advances in web-enabled graphics technologies have the potential to make a dramatic impact on developing highly interactive Geovisual Analytics applications for the Internet. An emerging and challenging application domain is geovisualization of regional (sub-national) statistics. Higher integration driven by institutional processes and economic globalisation is eroding national borders and creating competition along regional lines in the world market. Sound information at sub-national level and benchmarking of regions across countries, therefore, has increased in importance in the policy agenda of many countries. In this paper, we introduce “OECD eXplorer” – an interactive tool for analyzing and communicating gained insights and discoveries about spatial-temporal and multivariate OECD regional data. This database is a potential treasure chest for policy-makers, researchers and citizens to gain a better understanding of a region’s structure and performance and to carry out analysis of territorial trends and disparities based on sound information comparable across countries. Many approaches and tools have been developed in spatial-related knowledge discovery but generally they do not scale well with dynamic visualization of larger spatial data on the Internet. In this context, we introduce a web-compliant Geovisual Analytics toolkit that supports a broad collection of functional components for analysis and validation, hypothesis generation, communicating and finally collaborating gained insights and knowledge based on a snapshot mechanism that captures, re-uses and shares task-related explorative events. An important ambition is to develop a generic highly interactive web “eXplorer” platform that can be the foundation for easy customization of similar dynamic web applications using different geographical boundaries and indicators and be publicly available. Given this global dimension, the dream of building a repository “statistical Wiki” of progress indicators, where experts and public users can use these generic tools to compare situations for two or more countries, regions or local communities, could be accomplished.

Geovisual Analytics Tools for Communicating Emergency and Early Warning

The large and ever-increasing amounts of multi-dimensional, multi-source, time-varying and geospatial digital information represent a major challenge for the analyst. The need to analyse and make decisions based on these information streams, often in time-critical situations, demands efficient, integrated and interactive tools that aid the user to explore, present and communicate visually large information spaces. This approach has been encapsulated in the idea of Geovisual Analytics, an emerging interdisciplinary field based on the principles from Visual Analytics that facilitates analytical reasoning and decision making through integrated and highly interactive visual interfaces and creative visualization of complex and dynamic data. Geovisual analytics supports geo-information for emergency and early warning systems through a science that augments analyst and decision-maker capabilities to assimilate complex situations and reach informed decisions. Geovisual analytics originates from geovisualization and information visualization but also growing particularly on a high degree of synergy from scientific visualization. In this context, we introduce a web-enabled toolkit GeoAnalytics Visualization (GAV) and associate demonstrators developed in close collaboration with SMHI and OECD, composed of GAV components facilitating a broad collection of dynamic visualization methods integrated with the Adobe© Flash© and Flex© development platform. We also seek to support collaborative knowledge sharing.

Measuring Metropolitan Areas: A Comparative Approach in OECD Countries

Metropolitan areas play a crucial role on the economic performance of countries. They tend to concentrate important shares of the national population and economic activity, but also important shares of innovation, highly educated workers and infrastructures. The 90 largest metropolitan areas in OECD countries, for example, account for around 40 % of OECD population and almost 50 % of its economic activity (OECD 2011).