Interplay between maritime and land modes in a system of cities

Abstract

Maritime and land transportation modes play a vital role in the growth of urban places and the distribution of resources. In particular, port terminals and road infrastructures connect urban areas in different scales, from local to global regions, because they share common characteristics in order to avoid geographical discontinuities (Rodrigue, 2013). However, modeling spatial networks and analyzing their statistical attributes is not trivial because there is little agreement among disciplines on a common framework. The economic and transport geography subfields exemplify this situation, and they have implicitly or explicitly analyzed geospatial configurations (Henderson and Thisse, 2004; Batty, 2013). The new economic geography, such as the work of Krugman (1996), offers an approach to model theoretical systems of cities, but its application has been narrowed by managing big spatial data. On the other hand, spatial networks have applied this complex data and generated interesting models but have missed explanations of social mechanisms behind real-world geographical patterns (Barthelemy, 2011). Therefore, we propose a novel application where economic geography ideas are translated to a spatial network based on ports, roads, and urban data.