Settlement formation. Part I: a dynamic theory.

"The dynamic process of settlement formation is a fundamental issue in regional science. Our proposed model integrates the economic and migratory sectors in terms of endogenous variables in order to describe the evolution of continuous population distributions as a self-organising process.... The purpose...is to show that under strongly idealised conditions, a population consisting of different subpopulations with different economic activities will evolve into a differentiated population pattern. Each member of the subpopulations has the possibility to migrate between locations stimulated by rational economic reasons. This idea, which seems almost self-evident on the level of qualitative argumentation, [will] be cast into a mathematically self-contained quantitative dynamic model." excerpt