Worker intra-urban residential migration and spatial labour market change in Melbourne's functional economic regions

This paper investigates the intra-urban residential migration of workers in Melbourne and assesses the spatial effects of this dynamic on urban internal structure and spatial labour markets. Intra-urban migration is an important category of internal migration that relocates human and social capital in urban areas, contributing to changes in urban residential and labour market structure. This paper fills the gap in internal migration literature by determining spatial residential movement dynamics through a spatial analysis of census-based intra-urban migration flow data. In addition to detailed migration flow analysis undertaken at a local scale, the paper contributes an improved economic data geography based on functional economic regions (FERs) that permits analysis of the intersection of worker migration flows with sub-metropolitan labour markets. Our results show that intra-urban migration results in a strong outward flow of workers in Melbourne, which primarily appears to be shaped by spatial housing markets. This process, in turn, contributes to the dispersion of labour markets in Melbourne, complicating policy aims concerning urban agglomeration and limiting urban spatial expansion.