Employment decentralisation: Polycentricity or scatteration? the case of Barcelona

At the present time, most large cities in the world are polycentric and, at the same time, they are undergoing processes of employment decentralisation and deconcentration. It has been argued that polycentricity is just an intermediate stage between monocentricity and a more unstructured, chaotic and amorphous location model, scatteration. For the case of the polycentric Barcelona, the aims of this study are to test: whether its employment is moving from polycentricity to scatteration; and, whether its employment location model is increasingly random and unstructured. The results show that, in spite of the decentralisation and deconcentration processes, employment concentrated in centres still represents a significant percentage of total employment and new sub-centres have emerged in the periphery. What is more, the results also show an increasing influence of employment sub-centres on employment location and density conditions. As a result, polycentricity has been reinforced. © 2010 Urban Studies Journal Limited.