Measurement and Evolution of Residential Mobility in Spanish Metropolitan Areas

The goal of this article is to quantify the evolution of residential mobility over three decades in metropolitan areas of Spain, for which it is necessary to overcome different conceptual and, above all, methodological obstacles that constitute the core of the paper. The first task is to define residential mobility, which should be differentiated from the close phenomenon of migration. The second is to delve deeper into the details of the quantification of residential mobility using the only data source in Spain that allows doing so: the census. Lastly, the evolution of residential and migratory mobility in Spain is studied at two different scales of analysis: the national level and the metropolitan level. Thus, we have reconstructed the evolution of residential mobility over thirty years, which runs parallel but different from migrations.