Thomas Niedomysl’s research while affiliated with Stockholm University and other places

This paper analyzes city system dynamics, based on a theoretical framework relating interaction potentials to agglomeration economies and density externalities. It employs new historical time series data on population size of cities in Sweden over two centuries (1810–2010) and introduces two schematic growth factors: (i) the intra-city potential and (ii) the extra-city potential located in in rings encircling each city. The first factor is measured by each city’s population size, while the second is a vector of distance-discounted population size for each of a city’s urban rings. In this way, we can explain a city’s growth as a function of its interaction potential inside the city, as well as inside the first, second hand third ring. A robust finding is that cities with large ring potentials follow different development paths than those with small ring potentials. We also find clear evidence of structural change between the two centuries 1810–1910 and 1910–2010. In the first period, city growth is positively impacted by the size of the intra-city potential, whereas the same potential dampens or reduces the growth in the second period. Moreover, the ring potentials outside the city tend to switch from having negative growth stimulation in the first period to having positive stimulation in the second period.

The influence of personal recommendations on decision‐making is well‐established. To date, however, most research appears to have focussed on decisions of less importance. This study explores how place recommendations may have an impact on internal migration. Drawing on extraordinarily voluminous survey data, based on approximately half a million responses in Swedish municipalities between 2010 and 2018, the analyses of this paper are focused on the extent to which people would recommend friends and acquaintances to move to their respective municipalities, on the locational features influencing such recommendations, and on the relationship between recommendations and net‐migration. Contributing to research on the role of social networks in migration research, the results reveal both a widespread tendency among inhabitants to give positive place recommendations and a very strong positive association between place satisfaction and place recommendations. In addition, a tentative analysis suggests that highly recommended municipalities benefit in terms of net‐migration and, hence, population growth.

This study adds to knowledge on place-based fear of crime. First, by proposing a method to coordinate and code unsafe locations from an open-ended question in a random sample survey among residents of Uppsala, Sweden. The method is performed through an automated script in R with manual work steps. Second, by identifying types of functional locations, e.g. traffic centres, city parks, green spaces etc., reported by residents as unsafe. Third, by examining whether these unsafe locations spatially cluster. Fourth, by examining whether unsafe locations or clusters of unsafe locations also tend to overlap with hotspots of crime. Fifth, by examining to what extent living conditions are related to the occurrence of unsafe locations and their potential spatial clustering.

Notions about the ideal place to live have long provided impetus for local and regional planning. However, little is known about how locational ideals correspond to perceived realities. This paper draws on Swedish survey data, in which respondents rate features of their current place of residence and compare their location with that of their ideals. The empirical results suggest that primary features of local environments are, unexpectedly, not more important for place satisfaction than secondary features. In addition, accounting for municipality-level qualities, findings indicate that more peripheral places in general are perceived as more proximate to Utopia.

Human activity is a major driver of change and has contributed to many of the challenges we face today. Detailed information about human population distribution is fundamental and use of freely available, high-resolution, gridded datasets on global population as a source of such information is increasing. However, there is little research to guide users in dataset choice. This study evaluates five of the most commonly used global gridded population datasets against a high-resolution Swedish population dataset on a pixel level. We show that datasets which employ more complex modeling techniques exhibit lower errors overall but no one dataset performs best under all situations. Furthermore, differences exist in how unpopulated areas are identified and changes in algorithms over time affect accuracy. Our results provide guidance in navigating the differences between the most commonly used gridded population datasets and will help researchers and policy makers identify the most suitable datasets under varying conditions.

Knowledge about the past, current and future distribution of the human population is fundamental for tackling many global challenges. Censuses are used to collect information about population within a specified spatial unit. The spatial units are usually arbitrarily defined and their numbers, size and shape tend to change over time. These issues make comparisons between areas and countries difficult. We have in related work proposed that the shape of the lit area derived from nighttime lights, weighted by its intensity can be used to analyse characteristics of the population distribution, such as the mean centre of population. We have processed global nighttime lights data for the period 1992–2013 and derived centroids for administrative levels 0–2 of the Database of Global Administrative Areas, corresponding to nations and two levels of sub-divisions, that can be used to analyse patterns of global or local population changes. The consistency of the produced dataset was investigated and distance between true population centres and derived centres are compared using Swedish census data as a benchmark.

Business owners play an important role in driving regional economic growth, and policy-makers seek to attract and retain such entrepreneurs by most means available. This paper analyses migration patterns, the factors that influence the propensity to move and assesses the relationship between firm performance and individual migration both before and after the move. The results show that (1) known explaining variables of migration propensity also hold for business owners; (2) owners with more substantial firms in terms of turnover and employees are more geographically anchored; and (3) a simultaneous move of residence and firm has an unclear impact on firm performance.

The rise of ICT and the shift toward jobs with more flexibility in working hours and places of work sparked popular debates about potential for a ‘rural renaissance’. A key argument was that there are increasing possibilities to live in the countryside while being employed in large cities. This paper uses data spanning two decades to examine trends in and characteristics of employee–employer ties between rural and urban areas in Sweden. Our main results suggest that rural-to-urban long-distance commuting is rapidly increasing, but not as fast as commuting flows elsewhere. Compared to the rural population at large, rural residents working in large cities constitute a strongly selected group of workers who are well paid, have long educations, are young and also have advanced knowledge-intensive occupations. Only about 30 percent of those who become rural-to-urban long-distance commuters have moved from urban areas; the vast majority constitute those who already lived in rural areas before starting to commute to urban areas.

The statistical resources at hand for segregation research are usually almost exclusively confined to annual or decennial records where the only available spatial information is the individual’s place of residence. This coarse temporal periodicity and spatial resolution provides a very limited account of people’s diurnal lives. Incorporating mobility and temporal dimensions in segregation analysis is advocated within a growing body of research but there has rarely been sufficient data to make this possible. In this paper, we employ a fine-grained mobile phone dataset outlining the daily mobility of a substantial sample of the residents in Sweden’s metropolitan areas. Combining spatial trajectory data with detailed socio-economic residential statistics, we are able to study how everyday spatial mobility in cities shapes the segregation experiences of people and changes the segregation levels of places. Results indicate that while mobility alleviates segregation for some individuals, the population of a large number of areas remain highly segregated even when daily mobility is taken into account. Individuals residing or spending time in central urban areas are more exposed to individuals from other areas because of daily moves to these central places. Daytime movement to central areas also reduces segregation significantly for people from places remote from city centres but with high average levels of mobility whilst daytime segregation levels remain close to their original night-time levels in low-mobility areas in the outskirts of the cities.

The doctoral dissertation is a key component of postgraduate education that plays an important role for knowledge production and hence the development of a discipline. Swedish human geography currently lacks an overview of dissertations. This article fills this knowledge gap by reporting findings from a unique database covering all doctoral dissertations between 1884 and 2015. The paper focuses on the demographics of the authors (age, gender), the format of the dissertation and explores productivity variations for authors of compilation dissertations. The findings show a notable increase in the number of doctoral dissertations since the late 1960s but a decreasing share of doctoral dissertations in the social sciences since the 1970s. In terms of demographics, we show that while the age of the authors remains relatively stable, the gender-balance has improved considerably. In terms of format, the monograph has rapidly given way to compilation dissertations, which now account for half the number of dissertations. More than 70% of all dissertations are now published in English. Statistical results suggest that the likelihood of completing a compilation dissertation is greater if the doctoral candidate is young and if attending Umeå University. But individual author productivity for compilation dissertations is mainly influenced by unobservables.