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Teleworking may increase the willingness to accept a longer commute. This paper presents new evidence of the effect of teleworking on the length of commutes. We use novel panel data from the Netherlands, for the years 2008-2018, and find stronger effects compared to studies that use older data. Between 2008 and 2018 however, the effect was remarkably stable: workers that started teleworking increased their commutes by 12 percent on average. We analyse heterogeneity in the effect of teleworking on commuting across different levels of urbanization and across occupations. This study stresses the effects of teleworking on the geographical scale of labour markets, and provides important inputs for policymakers that aim to promote teleworking.

Despite the many negative aspects of life in cities, urban promises of economic prosperity, freedom and happiness have fuelled the imagination of generations of migrants, who have flocked to cities in search of a better life, invariably exaggerating the opportunities and neglected the potential disadvantages of their choice. This paper uses insights from psychological literature to better understand why people have such strong, positive and apparently overrated expectations about cities. We dwell into concepts of bounded rationality to describe the cognitive biases and heuristics affecting decision-making under uncertainty and apply them to the way individuals perceive and act upon the promises of urban life. By linking this literature to urban theory, we can better understand how individuals make their decisions about moving to and living in cities. We thereby offer an understanding of urbanisation and migration processes departing from economic rationality assumptions and explain the remarkable attractive force of cities throughout human history. Finally, we discuss the ways in which human biases in favour of city narratives and bright urban futures can be exploited by 'triumphalist' accounts of cities in policy and media, which neglect the embedded injustices and structural problems of urban life.

Spatial restructuring processes occurred in many economically advanced countries with opposing forces of concentration and deconcentration leading to the emergence of polycentric urban configurations. However, diverging empirical approaches are applied in several studies – a matter that contributes to conceptual confusion and a ‘fuzzy’ use of the term polycentricity. Against that background, a discussion is held to what extent this conceptual fuzziness can be narrowed down to derive a working definition for a quantitative study of polycentricity. Likewise, it is evaluated how to translate this concept into an empirical approach. A spatial scale of 1 km² grid cells ensures a high analytical depth and a joint consideration of employees and built-up volume reflects the multidimensional nature of urban spatial structure. Thus, prospects and limitations of jointly considering employees and built-up volume are evaluated by a literature review and own empirical analyses. Additionally, several conceptually different methods for subcenter identification are applied to the same data and the same study regions. These methods are threshold based ones, exploratory spatial data analyses and semi-parametric regressions. A revisit of these methods’ rationales as well as their outcomes for both employees and built-up volumes finally permits assessing how far a fuzzy concept can be narrowed down to make it analytically feasible. Regarding the polycentricity of four German city regions, the finding is that spatial disparities exist in all study regions. Yet, comparing the empirical results reveals that an agreement on the number, size and precise location of the identified centers and subcenters cannot be reached. This result holds for both employees and built-up volumes although these variables’ spatial patterns differ in details. The empirical conclusion is to apply a ‘double-funnel’ concept to cope with conceptual and analytical fuzziness of polycentricity. This concept’s base is to successively increase the level of detail of both the spatial scale and the applied set of methods. From a conceptual point of view, it can be concluded that it is necessary to consider not only one urban or regional economic model but to incorporate several conceptually different models to understand the variegated nature of urban spatial structure – and thus that of polycentricity.