Population Growth and Re-Urbanization in Spanish Inner Cities: The Role of Internal Migration and Residential Mobility

Antonio Lopez-Gay, Center for Demographic Studies (Barcelona)

After 25 years of an intense population decrease, the central cities of Barcelona and Madrid have recently experienced a remarkable increase of population. Less intense trends, but in the same direction, have been identified in smaller cities. Thus, metropolitan areas in Spain have come to share the reurbanization processes that many other cities in Western and Norhtern Europe and in the United States began to experience during the last part of the 20th century. This paper aims at analyzing the back to the city movements in the largest Spanish metropolitan areas, mainly from a geo-demographic perspective. The excellent temporal and geographic coverage of the Spanish Register of Residential Movements — a 100% microdata dataset including each residential movement occurred in Spain and the migrant’s demographic characteristics — enables us to analyze the territorial areas of residential relation of the city center, its temporal evolution, and the demographic structure of individuals.