COMMUTING NETWORK OF AP VOJVODINA

Abstract

Introduction. In this paper we analyze the commuting flows of workers in Serbian province of Vojvodina. Commuting is an important socio-economic process which can reshape our understanding of borders of functional regions and metropolitan areas of different territories. Previous analyses of commuting in Serbia have been limited by the constraints of census data. While it's clear that commuting has a distinctive relational and spatial aspect, the available data only focuses on the starting point of commuting, namely the number of commuters in each municipality of Serbia. There is not data about the destination point, apart from the broad classification of commuters who travel to another place inside their municipality or outside the municipality or county. This fact poses a severe limitation for drawing sociological conclusions from commuting data in order to gain valuable insights into social and demographic development of any part of the Republic of Serbia. The aim of this paper is to surpass these limitations and to give more detailed description of the commuting flows in province of Vojvodina. Data. We base our analysis on the census data – the number of commuters originating from each municipality of Vojvodina. We focus on those commuters who travel to a place of work which is outside their municipality. Raw data suggests that there exists a relatively stable metropolitan commuter area around Novi Sad and it includes municipalities such as Temerin, Beočin and Opovo. However, there are municipalities with high relative commuter count who are distanced from Novi Sad and it's not clear if they belong to another metropolitan area or any other kind of „gravitational” pull zone. In order to find out patters of commuting outside of Novi Sad area, we have to reconstruct all commuting flows. Method. Our aim is to use a theoretical model of commuting flows and apply it on the available data to reconstruct a municipal commuting network of Vojvodina. In such a cartographic network, nodes are municipalities and the directed ties represent number of commuters from one municipality to another. Following previous research we opt for the gravitational model of commuter attraction. Using the basic equation of this model it's possible to calculate the relative attractiveness of one municipality to attract the commuters from another. This attractiveness depends on: the distance between two municipalities, population and the rate of employment in target municipality. After this step it's possible to estimate a theoretical network of commuting flows in Vojvodina. Results and discussion. The resulting network reveals three distinctive regions: the developed metropolitan area of Novi Sad; scarce and diffused gravitational pull region around Zrenjanin; and a disorganized commuting area around Subotica. Using network hub analysis we explore which municipalities have the most efficient commuting flows, meaning that the commuters are not distributed around several smaller municipalities, but are focused on the larger cities, who have higher average wages and standard of living. We find that all municipalities with high hub centrality are in or close to the metropolitan area of Novi Sad and also these municipalities are the ones who experienced the slowest depopulation process between 2002. and 2011. In conclusion, our analysis shows that the crucial element of any further demographic development of province of Vojvodina lies in the development of cities of Subotica and Zrenjanin and their capacity to attract organized flows of commuters on a regular basis, which would result in slowing or reversing the process of depopulation which represents a main demographic problem in Vojvodina as well as in the entire Republic of Serbia.