Short-term dynamics in the use of places: A space-time typology of visitor populations in the Netherlands

In a network society, spurred on by technological, social and economic factors, the process of land use deconcentration has resulted in various new urban forms such as edge cities and edgeless cities. While the consequences of this process for the distribution of the residential population and travel patterns have been extensively described and analysed, there has as yet been little investigation of the effect on visitors' use of places. Using the 1998 Netherlands National Travel Survey, the paper develops a typology of urban, suburban and rural municipalities located in monocentric and polycentric urban systems on the basis of dimensions of diurnal weekday variations in visitor populations. A two-step cluster analysis results in five types of municipality: 'central place', 'contemporary node', 'self-contained', 'mobile children' and 'local children'.