View article

The power of places to draw migrants is a topic of fundamental interest in geographical and related social studies and also in policy circles. This paper describes and demonstrates the utility of a measure of migration attractivity which is considered superior to those most widely used previously. Following a review of the importance now attached to measuring place attractiveness, the paper documents the deficiencies of the most commonly used methods involving numbers and rates of in‐migration and net migration. It goes on to argue for a measure of the relative intrinsic attractivity (RIA) of places which takes account of the spatial context of each place in terms of its accessibility from all the other places that are ‘at risk’ of supplying residents to it. It applies this approach to migration that took place in 1990–91 between all the local authority districts of mainland Britain, as recorded by the 1991 Census. The resultant …