Have Population Growth and Economic Activity Converged Towards the Same Pattern in the Spanish Metropolises?

The decentralization processes that have dominated the demographic growth of metropolitan areas in the course of recent decades have favoured in some cases the processes of dispersion and in others the growth of agglomerations that functionally orbit around the central nucleus. This paper attempts to verify whether, in the case of Spain, these patterns of population distribution within metropolitan structures have been maintained over the years, additionally, it attempts to compare the changes produced in the relocation of the population with those that have occurred in economic activity. With these objectives, based on the polycentric structure of the metropolitan areas, the percentage points of change in the population and employment of seven Spanish metropolises over the last three decades have been obtained. The results suggest that the distribution of the population has followed patterns very different from those observed in the distribution of economic activity, on the one hand, demographic decentralization, which seems to have slowed down over the last 30 years, has given rise to dispersed demographic growth in some metropolises and polycentric growth in others; while in economic activity, the loss of weight of the subcentres and their periphery seems to be the most common trait observed in the last 15 years in the metropolitan areas studied.Peer ReviewedObjectius de Desenvolupament Sostenible::10 - Reducció de les DesigualtatsPostprint (author's final draft