Transition from Urban Labor Market to Regional Labor Market in Iran: An Analysis of Floating Population Data

Daily commutings are one of the most important consequences of spatial mismatches between residential and work places. due to the economic, social and environmental impacts in urban regional scales, this phenomenon has attracted researchers, planners and policymakers in recent years. The main objective of this study is to provide a general overview of daily commutings in urban areas of Iran, and identifying the centers of urban floating population stablishment. Our data are the results of the General Census of population and housing in 2011, while the research method is descriptive-analytical and exploratory. Results of the research show that a significant portion (%9.05) of the urban working population is displaced daily between urban settlements. However, the spatial distribution of the urban floating population is very heterogeneous. The main focal centers of the floating population are placed in the metropolitan regions such as Tehran and Isfahan metropolitan regions. Indeed, the transition from a metropolitan city to metropolitan region, has led the urban-dwelled labor market, to expand its spatial scope into a regional labor market, resulting in a significant amount of daily home-to-workplace commutings in long distances. In spite of the evolution of the spatial structure of Iranian metropolitan cities and the formation of metropolitan regions, the dominant daily commutings pattern –due to the prevailed monocentric model- be from suburbs to central cities. However, there are also signs of commuting across the suburbs, or from central cities to the sunurbs.