The seemingly ever growing divide in the prospects and fortunes of not only cities and rural areas, but even the largest cities and their smaller peers has been one of the more profound trends of recent times, with clear implications for political movements ranging from Trump to Brexit.

New research from Sweden’s Linkoping University attempts to shed fresh light on the phenomenon.  Their analysis of the Swedish population shows a distinct surge in regional inequality, as more and more resources flood into cities that hoover up an ever greater share of the national wealth.

The authors suggest that a dominant perspective of urban development is that cities tend to go through a similar lifecycle of socioeconomic growth, with the only difference being the scale of that growth for cities of varying sizes.  It’s a view that proposes a parallel growth trajectory, with the divide between cities largely remaining the same.

“This idea has always puzzled me. It does not correspond to the increasing regional inequalities we observe in many countries around the world. The notion that cities grow completely in parallel appears empirically ill-founded as it is derived from datasets that only cover larger metropolitan areas. It misses out on small towns, many of which face a struggling economy and sustained out-migration of young and educated individuals,” the authors explain.

Regional inequality

This concept of self-similar urban growth was tested in the paper, which uses data from a range of cities across Sweden, with the smallest town having just 2,600 inhabitants, all the way up to the 2.5 million strong capital city.  The data charts the growth trajectories of this entire urban ecosystem.

The data shows that there was a substantial increase in inequality between smaller and larger cities between 1990 and 2012, with the larger cities showing a robust economic growth trajectory during that time.  The same cannot be said for their smaller peers, with towns of fewer than 75,000 inhabitants showing precious little resilience to either economic shocks or structural changes in society during the same timeframe.

There was a clear trend towards larger cities thrive as they develop specialized service industries and pull in talent both from other parts of the country and from overseas.  Such advantages were not evident in smaller towns, creating a distinctly two speed economy whereby core metropolitan areas grow much faster than regional centers, thus creating a distinctly uneven economic geography and growing inequality between urban and rural areas.

“My research is of considerable policy relevance. It empirically identifies regional divides and measures the social inequalities associated with city growth and regional migration,” the authors conclude.