Ricerc@Sapienza

Cities are at the forefront of societal change, addressing both to new challenges and new opportunities. Under the pressure of "World city formation" the cities integrate into a "functional city system", and therefore they cannot be fully understand independently of the network in which are embedded. How is this network structured? Which are the main relations that give shape to the dynamic and spatial organization of the network? How does it evolve? The literature about this issue is vast but it only focuses on the node's attributes, without being able to go into functional analyses of the linkages. The research's idea is to analyze the network from a relational point of view, using shock transmissions among cities as a proxy of the edges and to implement traditional macro-econometric tools to measure and map them. Panel Vector Autoregressive model (PVAR) can be applied to study the correlations among cities, and, through "Time Varying" technique, to investigate the dynamic patter of the network. Furthermore "Endogenous Cluster Factor" model will allow finding relevant features shared by the cities, based on the data point of view, as well as the transmission channel of the network.