the geography of commuting: the netherlands and belgium

American Geographical Society

The Geography of Commuting: The Netherlands and BelgiumAuthor(s): Robert E. DickinsonSource: Geographical Review, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Oct., 1957), pp. 521-538Published by: American Geographical SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/211863 .

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THE GEOGRAPHY OF COMMUTING: THE NETHERLANDS AND BELGIUM

ROBERT E. DICKINSON

G EOGRAPHICAL studies of the journey to work' have concentrated on two questions: the commuting range of individual cities, and the structure of the commutation area. A further question concerns what

may be called the "regional mobility" of the working population-the degree to which employed persons in the smallest administrative area travel daily to and from places of work beyond the boundaries of that area. It is impossible to make any systematic analysis of the regional mobility of labor in the United States because the census reports do not include the necessary information. A census of workplaces was taken in England and Wales in 1921 by rural and urban districts, but it was not repeated until 1951. In the United States such a census is generally regarded as fantastic, yet the data are urgently needed for the understanding of what we all recognize to be one of the nation's greatest domestic problems. Several European countries make census returns of the journey to work down to the smallest administrative unit, and it is these returns that are the basis of this essay. Attention is confined to the Netherlands and Belgium; a future article will deal with Germany.

Terms must first be defined. The terms Pendler and Pendelverkehr were devised by H. J. Losch in his report on the 1900 census of Wiirttemberg. The corresponding terms now used in the Netherlands are forensen and forensenverkeer, in Belgium and France actifs sortants and actifs entrants or migrations alternantes de residence et de travail. The objective of such a census is to record the place of work and the place of residence of every employed person. These are normally classified in the published returns for each gemeente (Netherlands), commune (Belgium and France), and Gemeinde (Ger- many), with some variations, as follows: (1) the people who work in the gemeente but live outside it, the in-commuters (werkforensen, Netherlands; entrants, Belgium; Einpendler, Germany); (2) the people who live in the gemeente but work outside it, the out-commuters (woonforensen, sortants, Auspendler); (3) the people who both live and work in the gemeente, resident workers; (4) the total number of workers who live in the gemeente (2 plus

3); and (5) the total number of workers in the gemeente (I plus 3). Some

I The best work on this subject is K. K. Liepmann: The Journey to Work: Its Significance for Industrial and Community Life (London, 1944).

>.DR. DIcKINSON is professor of geography at Syracuse University, New York.



522 THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

censuses also group the commuters according to age, sex, occupation, mode of transportation, and so on.

Even these detailed returns have certain drawbacks for geographical analysis. Most of the workers are daily travelers, though a good number (for example, salesmen and business representatives) have no fixed workplace or do not make a regular daily journey to the same workplace. It is also clear that one is not a commuter unless one travels across the local-government boundary. Thus one who lives just within the boundary of a city and travels one hour to work in that city is not a commuter in the census use of the term. One who lives just outside the boundary of the city and works just within it, a journey of perhaps only a few minutes, qualifies as a commuter. The numerous workers who live and work in an urbanized area but move across administrative boundaries each day are also classified as commuters; pseudo- forensen was the term coined by Van Vuuren2 to describe them. If and when the boundary of a central city is extended to embrace all the contiguous areas in the conurbation, the pseudo commuters no longer appear in the census. This happened in Utrecht when its boundaries were extended in 1950. In spite of such limitations, the census reports give an invaluable pic- ture of the regional mobility of labor.

THE NETHERLANDS3

According to the 1947 census the Netherlands had a total population of 9.6 million (estimated at 10.5 million in January, 1954) in a land area of 12,800 square miles. It had a net reproduction rate of 1.43 in 1949, and it is calculated that the population will increase to 13 million by 1970. Herein lies an urgent planning problem-increasing numbers and lack of space-to which the national government is already dedicated through the medium of a national plan and provincial planning authorities.

The population is concentrated in the provinces of North and South Holland and Utrecht, which together house about one-half of the total. Here are the three major cities, Amsterdam (859,ooo), Rotterdam (705,000), and The Hague (591,000). Together with Utrecht (242,000), Haarlem (165,000), and several smaller cities (such as Gouda, Delft, Leiden, and Amersfoort) and a cluster of dormitory towns around Hilversum in the Gooi district,

2 L. van Vuuren: Rapport betreffende een onderzoek naar de sociaal-economische structuur van een gebied in de Provincie Utrecht (1938; with portfolio of maps).

3 12e Volkstelling, Annex woningtelling, 31 Mei, 1947, Ser. B, Voornaamste cijfers per gemeente, Deel 6: Beroepsbevolking naar woon-, werk- en geboortegemeente (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, Utrecht, 1952).



COMMUTING: NETHERLANDS AND BELGIUM 523

they form "a wide-spread low-density conurbation"4 in the shape of an "urban ring" with a diameter of about 40 miles (Randstad Holland). This urbanized area had 3.5 million people in 1950, one-third of the total population of the country. Elsewhere, centers are small and scattered. Special attention, however, should be drawn to three industrial areas. De Twente, with textile and metalworking industries, has several small centers (for example, Enschede, 113,000) that draw their labor from one another as well as from the surrounding countryside. North Brabant has several old-established towns on its periphery and the larger modern city of Eindhoven (150,000) in its midst; these towns draw their labor not so much from one another as from the surrounding countryside. Limburg is almost exclusively a coal-mining area, with large modern pits and many small communities, so that there is a big crisscross movement of workers from home to pit.

The mobility of labor in terms of dwelling place and workplace may be expressed in two ways: the proportion of out-commuters to the total resident employed; and the proportion of in-commuters to the total employed. The in-commuters move to a relatively few centers of employment in the urban centers. The out-commuters move to these centers from more communities over a much wider area. The number of out-commuters for the whole country is equal to the number of in-commuters, except for the relatively few who daily cross the national frontier.

NUMBERS OF COMMUTERS AND MEANS OF TRANSPORT

In May, 1947, the grand total of persons who worked outside the gemeenten in which they lived was 544,ooo, or 15.2 per cent of the total number of employed persons. Of these, about 420,000 were regular daily commuters. However, in relation to the total number employed in each province the proportion of commuters was above the average of 15.2 per cent in two provinces: Limburg, with 23.1 per cent (partly owing to the smallness of the gemeenten); and Utrecht, with 22.2 per cent (owing to the fact that until 1950 the urbanized area included several contiguous but separate gemeenten). Well below the average were Friesland (8.8 per cent) and Drenthe (9.4 per cent). About half of all the commuters were located in the provinces of North and South Holland and Utrecht, the urban ring; about 22 per cent in the two southern provinces of North Brabant and Lim-

4 "Physical Planning in the Netherlands," 3rd edit., Ministry of Reconstruction and Housing (Netherlands Government Information Service, The Hague [1952]). See also H. J. Keuning: Mozaiek der functies: Proeve van een regionale landbeschrijving van Nederland op historisch- en economisch- geografische grondslag (The Hague, 1955). The figures are official estimates for January, 1954.




burg; and about 25 per cent in the rest of the country- the northeast and Zeeland.

A little more than half of the total of 544,000 were engaged in industry, and mnost of the other half in what may be described as services. An un- usually high percentage of miners and peat cutters commute (si.l). Fishing naturally takes a high percentage of workers away from home (45-4), though they are not strictly commuters. Other groups above the average of 15.2 per cent are the building trades (21.8 per cent), metalworking and shipbuilding (22.9 per cent), transport (19.1 per cent), and public services and professions (17.2 per cent).

Out of the total number of out-commuters, 52.3 per cent traveled by bicycle, 16.2 per cent by train, 14.2 per cent by bus, 7.2 per cent by tram, 4.1 per cent by automobile, 1.1 per cent by motorcycle, and 4.9 per cent by other means. The percentage of cyclists ranges from about 75 in Groningen and Drenthe and 68 in Friesland, where alternative means of transport are few, to 40 in North Holland, where alternative means are numerous. Train and bus vie for second place. The bus is used more in Drenthe, Overijs- sel, Gelderland, Zeeland, and Limburg; only in North and South Holland is there a marked excess of train over bus (32.3 and 20.4 per cent by train alone), owing mainly to the heavy interurban traffic on the dense rail net- work. The highest proportions of bus commuters are found in Limburg (24.3 per cent), Gelderland (22.1 per cent), and Overijssel (20.4 per cent). It is only in the most highly urbanized western provinces that the tram absorbs a considerable part of the traffic. Indeed, in South Holland the tram, with 17.7 per cent of the total, is almost equal to the train (20.4 per cent) as a carrier of commuters.

OUT-COMMUTERS

We may now turn to the more detailed pattern of commuting that is revealed by the statistics for the 1015 gemeenten. Figure 1 shows the percentage of the total number of workers resident in each gemeente who are out-commuters (woonforensen). About 45 per cent of the gemeenten have an outward movement less than the national average of 15.2 per cent. The percentage of the gemeenten in each province with this low mobility is highest in Friesland (91), Drenthe (85), Groningen (85), and Zeeland (62).

It is lowest in Limburg (31), South Holland (28), and Utrecht (only 15). About 62 per cent of the gemeenten have between lo and 30 per cent of

out-commuters. The gemeenten, 22 per cent of the total, with less than lo per cent of out-commuters are predominantly rural. The majority of the




OUT-COMMUTERS AS PER CENT OF TOTAL RESIDENT-EMPLOYED

BY GEMEENTE. CENSUS OF MAY 31,19470

LIIUnder 10.0% .... Lul10,1 to 20.0% ff ~20.1 to 30.0%

lllllIB30.1 to 40.0% 40.1 to 50.0% Over 50.1%

State average 15.2%

N~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~3 ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 0

0 50 MILES

GEOGA, AEV. MTr gAO

FIG. i-Commuting in the Netherlands. (Adapted and redrawn from map prepared by the office of the National Plan in The Hague.)




larger cities, however, also belong to this group. They are great reservoirs of labor, and though the numbers of their out-commuters are large, these make up only a very small part of the labor force resident in the city. The gemeenten with more than 30 per cent of out-commuters, 16 per cent of the total, fall into four groups: a few fishing communities, such as Urk and Marken, where the men work away from home; exclusive residential sections with special amenities, such as the sandy hills of the Gooi and Heuvelrug between Amsterdam and Utrecht; places with an autochthonous reservoir of labor, such as the coal-mining communities of Limburg; and gemeenten on the outskirts of cities that have grown as residential sections or have had an autochthonous population that has found employment in the cities.

Although out-commuters are drawn from wide areas, most of them come from relatively few gemeenten. There are io6 gemeenten with more than 1000 commuters each, and 49 of them have more than 2000, or two-fifths of the grand total. The largest numbers of workers naturally move from the five largest cities (more than io,ooo each), though they make up only a small percentage of all the resident workers. Gemeenten on the outskirts of large cities are also high in this category (up to 6o per cent) and, together with their adjoining cities, contribute a good fifth of all the out-commuters (Rotterdam-Schiedam, 33,ooo; The Hague, 30,000; Amsterdam, 23,000;

and Utrecht, 19,000).

IN-COMMUTERS

Let us consider the gemeenten that give employment to these daily migrants. The situation may again be described by the numbers of in- commuters (werkforensen) or by the proportion of these to the total workers in the gemeente. The latter indicates the degree of dependence of a gemeente on labor drawn from outside its boundaries. In-commuters make up less than io per cent of all workers in some 50 per cent of all the gemeenten and reach 10 to 30 per cent in some 45 per cent of the gemeenten. This means that less than 5 per cent of the gemeenten (44 in number) have more than 30 per cent of in-commuters. Most of these are in the three western provinces and in the coal-mining area of Limburg. Industry is the raison d'etre and the dominant attraction in many smaller centers, such as those on the outskirts of Utrecht and in the Zaan Valley north of Amsterdam. A specific case is Best, which has 150o workers, most of whom are employed by one plant, the Bata footwear concern. Other gemeenten with a unifunctional character are the mining communities of Limburg, such as Heerlen (40 per cent) and Geleen (63 per cent). Gemeenten with 20-3 0 per cent of in-




commuters similarly include specialized industrial centers, but in this group there are also smaller regional service centers that draw on their environs for labor. The major cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague, plus Groningen and Leeuwarden, draw less than io per cent of their workers from outside, but, as shown below, they actually draw the largest numbers.

The concentration of in-commuters in a few places is brought out by their numbers. There are 82 gemeenten that have more than 1000 in- commuters each, and these account for about three-fifths of the grand total. Only 11 of them have more than 5ooo each. The largest is Amsterdam (28,000), but this is closely followed by Rotterdam-Schiedam (23,000), The Hague (22,000), and Utrecht (19,000). (These minimum figures are adjusted to include the adjacent gemeenten that have large inflows.) These four agglomerations alone account for almost a fifth of all in-commuters. Heerlen (11,200), Geleen (9800), and Eindhoven (9400) are next and far outdistance all other centers.

These 82 gemeenten of greatest labor inflow form clusters in Overijssel, where there is a large amount of commuting to textile and engineering works; in northeastern Utrecht, where residential development has been followed by industrial growth, with resulting complicated patterns of both in and out movements; and in the coal-mining districts of Limburg, where gemeenten are small, pits large, and housing dispersed, both next to the pits and in com- pact villages, so that here again there is a complex pattern of local commuting. The major cities dominate the commuter flows in the western provinces.

RANGE OF TRAVEL

Inflows to 26 centers from a radius of 30 kilometers are shown in the census report.5 A distinction must be made between two kinds of commuter: the one who has been born and bred in a country village and chooses to retain a pied a terre and travel in daily to his work (the autochthonous commuter); and the one who migrates to a city and lives on its outskirts or "near" the plant (allochthonous commuter). The latter is associated with the normal process of residential growth of an urban center. The former is a characteristic development in continental Europe but is relatively insignificant in the United States (though the part-time farmer is of growing importance in certain areas). The ultimate determinant of the range of travel is the time required. There can be no hard and fast rule about this, since it

512C Volkstelling [see footnote 3 above], pp. 38-42.




depends on the choice of the worker and the policy of the employer. But many studies in the Netherlands indicate that, in general, the majority of workers travel up to half an hour to and from work each day, one hour is frequent, but two hours is obviously undesirable in human and economic terms. The distance covered in a given time depends on the means of transportation. There is a significant break in the frequency ofjourneys at a distance of about 15 kilometers. This takes in the great majority of commuters, who travel up to one hour by bicycle and tram. Beyond this distance numbers rapidly decrease, and bicycle and tram are replaced by bus and train up to 30 kilometers representing a journey time of about one hour. Beyond, though workers are drawn from scattered places, the cost and time of travel make such long journeys undesirable except in favorably situated places along railroad routes.

There ultimately arises the question of the competition of other centers of employment. Moreover, the number of commuters moving out from a gemeente depends not merely on accessibility to place of work but also on the social and economic conditions of the community. Relevant factors are the numbers of the potential male and female workers, the degree of agricultural underemployment, the general level of living, and the strength of traditional ties to the family and the village. These are of great importance in both the Netherlands and Belgium, where many workers have such ties and have often inherited or acquired a piece of cultivated land. They prefer the home in the country and the journey to work to the impersonal life of the city. Also, the rate of employment exceeds the rate of building of houses, and there is no doubt that many people commute because they cannot move into dwellings nearer to their work.

All these factors operate in the case of the vast Philips concern at Eind- hoven, with its 30,000 employees and 8500 in-commuters. A fleet of 110 buses brings in the workers over an average distance of 45 kilometers in a journey time of 1 to 112 hours in each direction. To this must be added an average of a quarter of an hour spent twice a day between bench and bus. Average cost per head is 912 guilders a week.Workers coming in by other means of transportation (train, bus, or bicycle) receive 20 Dutch cents per kilometer per week beyond a distance of 9 kilometers this being con- sidered the limit of a normal journey to work. Within the hour limit by bicycle of 15 kilometers Philips provides no transportation facilities, and it provides connections beyond this limit only if no alternatives are available. In 1955, 1250 Belgian girls were brought in by bus with ajourney time twice daily up to 212 hours at prohibitive costs. Owing to the total absorption




of the accessible labor supply and the high costs of transportation over long distances, plus the problem of organization at the plant, Philips is opening new plants in adjacent towns where local labor is available over shorter distances. The majority of the commuters would prefer to live nearer their work, and houses are being built as rapidly as possible in Eindhoven.6

7 AMSTERDAM

Amsterdam had in 1947 a population of 836,ooo and 314,000 resident workers. There were 19,300 out-commuters and 28,ooo in-commuters (6.1 per cent of the resident workers and 8.7 per cent of all workers respec- tively). There are thus about 322,000 workers in the city. About nine-tenths of all the in-commuters come from the area within a radius of 30 kilometers, chiefly from southern Kennemerland (including Haarlem; 23.3 per cent), the peripheral districts (22.8 per cent), the Gooi (18.3 per cent), and the Zaandam strip (7.0 per cent), an industrial area adjacent to the north side of the city that employs most of its resident labor. Figure 2 shows the gemeenten from which ten male workers or more (four-fifths of total workers) travel daily to Amsterdam; the figures are percentages of the total outgoing male workers from each gemeente. The heavy line encloses the gemeenten from each of which more workers travel to Amsterdam than to any other single city; in fact, 75 per cent of all the in-commuters come from this area. Note that the Zaandam industrial area is a center of attraction stronger than that of the city, and farther north Alkmaar is an even stronger focus. To the west and south the commuting range is limited by the stronger pull of Haarlem, Leiden, and Utrecht. In each gemeente within this area more than 30 per cent of the out-commuters go to Amsterdam, whereas the figure drops to 10 per cent outside the area.

The means of travel of the in-commuters to Amsterdam may be related to concentric belts defined by radii of 12, i8, 24, and 30 kilometers. About 85 per cent of the male workers are drawn from within the 30-kilometer radius. From within a radius of 12 kilometers are drawn 30 per cent of the commuters; half travel by bicycle, only 16.5 per cent by train (mainly from Zaandam), and the rest are equally divided among tram, bus, and car. From the 12-to-i8-kilometer belt are drawn 21.5 per cent of the total; more than half come in by train, nearly a third by tram (mainly from Haarlem and

6 Personal communication from Personnel Department, Philips, Eindhoven, dated April 18, 1957. Also visit and interviews in July, 1955.

7 See 12e Volkstelling [see footnote 3 above], pp. 49-53; and "Het Amsterdamse forensenverkeer," Statist. Mededelingen Bur. van Statistiek der Gemeente Amsterdam No. 132, 1952.




Gemeente with fewer than 10 -males In the Amsterdam working

L_Jforce

< <10%0

20 KILME < 00 PECNTG

20tc3O/9 OF MALES

30 o ~% AMSTERDAM

FIc. 2-Amsterdam: in-commuters from gemeenten with more than io male workers inl the city, expressed as percentage of total male out-commuters from each gemeente. (Data from i2e Volkstelling. . . ., 31 Mci, 1947

[see text footnote 3J.)

north from Edam), and a very small number by bus, bicycle, or car. From the 1 8-to-24-kilometer belt come one-quarter of the total commuters, 70 per cent of them by train and 13.6 per cent by tram; the latter are drawn from the exclusive residential district in the dune country west of laarlem.



COMMUTING: NETHERLANDS AND BELGlUM 53 1

Beyond 24 kilometers there is a sharp falling off, and only 1o per cent of the commuters are drawn from a radius of 24 to 30 kilometers. From 30 kilometers and beyond come 1s per cent of the total. Some 39 per cent of these are not daily commuters; all the daily travelers come in by train. The main points of general significance are: half of all the commuters travel by train, and the proportion increases with the length of the journey; the bicycle is predominant within a radius of 12 kilometers; the tram is used on distances of 12 to 24 kilometers on "interurban lines" where service is frequent and rapid; and auto travel has a fairly constant share of the total commuters in each of the concentric belts (7 per cent).

BELGIUM

Belgium, with a population of 9.o million in an area of 11,780 square miles, is a highly industrialized country in which urbanism has developed not only through the drift of people into the towns but also, more than in any other country in the world, through the development of the daily journey from home to workplace. The many different spatial associations of home and work include the widely scattered plants and homes in West Flanders, where the concept of an "urban place" virtually breaks down; the small and separate coal-mining communities of the Borinage, in southern Hainaut; the new communities that have grown around the big new coal pits in the Cam- pine; and the large daily immigration of workers into the great cities of Brussels, Antwerp, Liege, and Ghent. Commutation developed in the latter half of the nineteenth century, through the special facilities afforded by the state railroads, and the latest census (1947) revealed that 40 per cent of the employed worked in places outside the communes in which they lived! This compares with 15.2 per cent for the Netherlands, 13 per cent for Switzerland, and 15.3 per cent for North Rhine-Westphalia, with its great nexus of urban centers grouped around the Ruhr. It is certainly the highest degree of labor mobility in the world. In only 8o communes, barely 3 per cent of the total number, does the proportion fall below 10 per cent.

The growth of commuting on the Belgian railroads, encouraged by reduced fares for workmen, can be traced from the census of 1896.8 In that year the proportion of workers employed outside their home communes

8 A. Delperee: La mobilite g6ographiqu'e de la main-d'oeuvre belge, Rev. des Sciences Econ., Sep- tember, 1951, pp. 139-173. See also E. Mahaim: Les abonnements d'ouvriere sur les lignes de chemins de fer belges et leurs effets sociaux, Travaux l'Inst. de Sociol., Brussels, 191o; and H. Demain: Les migrations ouvrieres a travers la Belgique (Louvain, 1919). Mahaim's work is summarized by Liepmann, op. cit. [see footnote 1 above], pp. 122-123.




was generally between one and two tenths of the total. In 14 arrondissements the mobility was much higher; these were situated in the industrialized Walloon districts, along the French frontier in West Flanders (40 per cent), and in Luxembourg (52 per cent). The outward movement in West Flanders included many women workers (about 3000) who traveled daily to the textile factories on the French side of the frontier.

By 1910 the situation had assumed essentially its present form. Mahaim's study revealed that the railroad was still the main means of transportation, and the number of commutation tickets had doubled. The greatest mobility was now recorded in the central arrondissements, where the large cities, espe- cially Brussels, were drawing heavily on the labor of the countryside. There was also a remarkable movement of workers in all directions wherever work could be reached by daily travel to and from one's home. Weekly commutation tickets on the state railroads, issued at greatly reduced prices, were made available to workmen only, craftsmen and salaried employees still being excluded. Such tickets were carried by one-quarter of all industrial workers, and the average length of the round trip was 19 kilometers. " . ... Thousands of rural residents move into the factories in the towns, and artisans move out from the towns into the countryside . . . Thousands of Flemings flock to the Walloon regions.... From all parts of the country the provincials move into the capital. There is developing in this way a mix- ture of populations, a better understanding of each other, a blend of aptitudes and needs, that serves more effectively to unite the whole nation. This is social integration."9 Belgium in 1910 was becoming a single labor market and a more nearly homogeneous social milieu.

Between the two World Wars the movement grew. Bicycle, bus, and car were added to the railroad. Increased numbers of workers moved daily across the French and Dutch frontiers. Brussels became a center of ever- growing attraction. Local movements increased in Flanders, though those in the industrialized Walloon districts were (and are) greater than those to Ghent and Antwerp. The connection of Limburg with Liege was increased, and similarly Brussels increased its hold on the provinces of Flanders and Antwerp. The number of those daily crossing the French frontier is now about 5o,ooo (mainly from the Ypres and Courtrai districts of West Flanders). About 7500 workers moved from East Flanders into Holland in 1950, and more than half of them were females. Railroad censuses in 1948 and 1950 showed that about 52,000 persons traveled daily on workmen's tickets to

9 Mahaim, op. cit., p. 205.



60 to 80%|

Percentage of esdnemployed m to _f~~ 20 to 40%0

40to 60% 0 I

60 to 80%

Over 800 0

.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~EG RE. OCT. 1957 .

P ercentage of employed in-communero- total number employed in each comm-ne 1

mune. ( uc1947 f 0

1Q to 2Qo ,- 1to 20 9 ,

20 to 40%0(S cS 8

40

to 60%

~~0 50 Miles _ Ovfer 80% O 50 Kilometers

GEOGR. REV., OCT. 1957

FIG. 3-Belgium: percentage of resident-ernployed to total employed in each commune. (Repro- duced from 0. Tulippe- La population active en Belgique [see text footnote 11], Fig. 11.)

FIG. 4-Belgium: percentage of ernployed in-comrnuters to total number employed in each com-

mune. (Reproduced from 0. Tulippe: La population active en Belgique [see text footnote 1 1], Fig. 12.)



534 THE GEOGRAPHlCAL REVIEW

Brussels, 23,000 to Liege, 20,000 to Antwerp, 15,500 to Charleroi, and smaller numbers to Ghent and Namur. Detailed figures are not available for bus transport, but the daily total is probably about 35,000 for the country.'I

The census of Belgium for 1947 includes data by communes of thejourney to work on a basis comparable to that of the Netherlands census. These data (unpublished) have been summarized and mapped by provinces by Professor 0. Tulippe. Figures 3 and 4 are reproduced from his study. The data for the chief centers of in-commuting are mapped in the "Atlas du Survey National.""

RESIDENT WORKERS AND OUT-COMMUTERS

Figure 3 shows for each commune the percentage of the workers who live and work in it to the total number of workers who live in it. The balance is made up of the workers who live in the commune but work outside it; i.e. out-commuters. Thus the heavier the shading, the greater the in situ employment and the smaller the proportion of out-commuters. This map, with its key read in reverse, is directly comparable with the map of the Netherlands shown in Figure 1. The percentage of employment of local labor ranges from less than 20 for a very few communes to more than 8o, and even more than go, for a large number. In 1915 communes, out of a total of 2600, more than half of the workers are residents, and the majority of these communes have a ratio of about three-quarters. The lowest mobility -6o to 8o per cent, and often more than 8o per cent, of local labor-is characteristic of the predominantly rural areas. The main area is in the Ardennes, together with Entre-Sambre-et-Meuse and the Condroz, though it excludes the communes adjacent to the great industrial belt (defined by the Borinage-Sambre-Meuse-Vesdre) and the industrialized area of Belgian Lorraine. A second area is in the polders and sandy lands of West Flanders, a third includes large sections of the Campine, and a fourth is the Pays d'Herve, east of Liege. The percentages are much lower, however, in the rural areas around the cities and along the frontiers of Flanders, Hainaut, and Luxem- bourg. Low mobility (60-80 per cent of local labor) is also found in the large cities, in the Borinage-Sambre-Meuse-Vesdre industrial centers, and in the

? Delpere'e, op. cit., Sect. 8. II 0. Tulippe: La population active en Belgique: Localisation et mouvements, Les Cahiers d'Urba-

nisme No. 1 7, Brussels, 1954. There are so far six maps in the "Atlas du Survey National" (Sheets 25 to 30).

These show centers with more than 15o in-commuters each, the in-commuting areas of Brussels, the six places with more than 12,000 in-commuters (Antwerp, Borinage, Centre, Charleroi, Ghent, Liege), centers with 2500 to 12,000 in-commuters, centers with 300-2500 in-commuters, and movements across the frontiers, all six sheets in colors by communes. Photostats of the official returns by communes have been kindly lent by Professor Tulippe.



COMMUTING: NETHERLANDS AND BELGIUM 53 5

coal-mining districts of the Campine. It may be noted that Antwerp and Ghent employ more local labor than Liege and the Borinage coal-mining district. A large number of communes employ 40 to 6o per cent of local labor, which is about the average. This ratio is found in the heart of the country, west and south of Brussels, along the west-east industrial belt, and sporadically in Hainaut (western frontier districts) and in the Campine (eastern frontier districts). Hainaut shows a complicated pattern, with large variation of mobility from one commune to another. Few communes have ratios of 20 to 40 per cent, and they are situated conspicuously in the west- east industrial belt and in residential communes on the outskirts of Antwerp.

IN-COMMUTERS

Figure 4 shows the ratio of in-commuters to the total number of employed persons in each commune. The main areas in which each commune employs less than lo per cent of in-commuters lie in the Ardennes, the interior of West and East Flanders, and much of the central Campine (eastern Brabant). Again, these are predominantly rural areas, with low labor mobility. The communes with 10-20 and 20-40 per cent of in-commuters are in the coastal belt of the polders, in the districts of Courtrai and Tournai and of Entre- Sambre-et-Meuse and east of the Meuse (province of Namur), and, most conspicuously, in the predominantly rural areas of Brabant and the Condroz that border on the two great urban axes. The communes with the highest percentage inflows of labor, ranging from 40 to 6o and over of all workers, are in these two urban axes, namely the Borinage-Sambre-Meuse-Vesdre industrial belt and the south-north belt that reaches from Mons and Charleroi through Brussels to Antwerp. Note also the high inflows to the coal-mining communes of the Campine and to the cities of Ghent and Louvain. There is a remarkable complexity of movements in the districts of the Borinage and Charleroi, due, no doubt, to the existence of several small, but locally distinct, mining and industrial areas.

BRUSSELS'2

Brussels is here taken to mean the 20 contiguous urbanized communes

12 H. van der Haegen: De Brusselse werkforensen, Bull. Soc. Belge d'Etudes Geogr., Vol. 21, 1952, pp. 319-371; idem: Les migrants alternants bruxellois, ibid., Vol. 22, 1953, pp. 441-449. There are also important studies of Ghent and Liege, as follows: M. E. Dumont: Les migrations ouvrieres du point de vue de la delimitation des zones d'influence urbaine et la notion de zone d'influence predominante, ibid., Vol. 19, 1950, pp. 21-35; J. Alexandre: Les facteurs de l'attraction exercee sur la main-d'oeuvre par la region industrielle liegeoise, ibid., Vol. 20, 1951, pp. 245-25a; and S. and J. Alexandre: Les migrations definitives et alternantes dans les regions voisines de la region industrielle liegeoise, Actes du Congres de Luxembourg, Assn. Franiaise pour I'Avancement des Sci., 72e Sess., 1953, pp. 311-317.




< i .. r ' e o,; . )0 30 Miles 0 30 Kilometers

0~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

BRUSSELS INCOMMUTERS AS PERCENTAGE OF ALL COMMUTERS

FROM EACH COMMUNE lf, X

E 1< 5% e%S.t , nr 5 to 9%,

Lilli 0o19% . t%

20 to 39%0 N

40 to 59%X

60 to 79%

-> 80% ? Boundary of dominant attraction of Brussels J

and important centers of work within this sphere 2 .

.GEOGR. REV. OCT. 1957

FIG. 5-Brussels: in-commuters as percentage of all commuters from each commune. (Reproduced from H. van der Haegen: De Brusselse werkforensen [see text footnote 121.)

of which the city of Brussels is the dominant center. The movements of pseudo commuters are thus eliminated, and the agglomeration can be treated as a whole. Its population is 980,000, or 10.9 per cent of the total population of the country. Brussels so defined has 43 3,ooo resident workers and 137,000 in-commuters-a total of 570,000 daily workers, of whom 24 per cent come from outside (there are also 15,000 out-commuters, so that the net inflow of labor is 122,000). The in-commuters are drawn from all over Belgium, but 54 per cent come from within 25 kilometers, 33 per cent from 25 to 50 kilometers, and 12 per cent from farther away. One-third of all the communes send each more than 5 per cent of its workers to the capital (Fig. s). Of the total in-commuters, 85 per cent travel daily to their work (the remaining 15 per cent travel at irregular intervals). Two-thirds of them use the train and one-quarter the interurban lines (vicinal), the latter mainly within a distance of 20 kilometers. Bus and bicycle play an insignificant part.

This commuting traffic began in the nineteenth century, when workers




with jobs in the city preferred to live in their homes in the small towns and villages. The introduction of reduced workmen's fares on the railroads in 1870 was the main stimulus to commuting; for this meant that the worker was able to enjoy the higher wages of the city with little outlay on travel. The growth of the traffic can be traced statistically from 1896. In that year almost 11,ooo workers moved daily into the Brussels area (13 per cent of the total workers in the city). By 1910 the number had reached 27,000

(16 per cent of the total), and the number of contributing communes had increased threefold. The range of travel also had greatly increased: 31 per cent traveled more than 25 kilometers, as compared with only 13 per cent in 1896. In 1930 there were 65,ooo in-commuters, and by 1947 the total had reached 137,000.

Each of these periods had its distinct characteristics that affected the journey to work. In 1896 the workers were mainly drawn from the environs of the city and, to a lower degree, from the industrial areas of the Sambre Valley, Antwerp, and Ghent. In the 1900 'S there was a large influx of workers from the agricultural countryside, the result of growing numbers and a sur- plus of workers and, above all, the advent of the bicycle. From 1910 to 1930

the increasing inflow was due to the decreasing demand for labor in agri- culture and to the introduction in 1921 of the eight-hour day, which gave time to work a small piece of land in the country in the evenings. The large increase from 1930 to 1947 was due to the steady mechanization of agri- culture, the higher wages offered by the industrial centers, and the greater security of industrial jobs. There was a tendency for workers to have no land

or to give up their bit of land, and the question now arises whether the advantages of living as well as working in the city may not in the future more than offset the advantages of living in the village or small town. If this is so, there will be a much greater demand for dwellings nearer to the place of work.

RECENT TRENDS

The postwar period in Belgium, as in the Netherlands and in Germany, has seen two significant trends. First, industry's demand for labor has greatly and rapidly expanded, so that employment in specific centers has far ex- ceeded construction of housing. Second, the invention of a small motor that can be attached to a bicycle has reduced the time and extended the range of commuting. The result is that in both Belgium and the Netherlands, since the 1947 censuses, there has been a large increase in labor mobility and in the number of journeys to work. It is clear that in certain areas many



53 8 THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

autochthonous commuters still prefer to live in the country for personal reasons. Moreover, many new plants employ femnale labor, and girls who live with their families have no objection to a long daily journey to work for a few years before marriage. Again, if industry is in scattered and smaller centers, a dwelling in the country offers a wider choice of jobs, journeys in any case are short, and there is no "big city" attraction. But it is also clear from inquiries of workers in many large plants that the majority would prefer to live nearer to their work and preferably in the same town. More- over, plants that draw on local labor, and often subsidize travel costs, such as the Philips concern in Eindhoven, have reached a stage at which it is un- economical to bring in labor over long distances. Philips must now establish branches in neighboring towns that can draw on an area of some six to ten kilometers, from which the workers can reach work by bicycle or bus within about half an hour. This labor orientation is now being adopted as a definite policy in the Netherlands for the location of new industry and for the relief of underemployment and low living levels in rural areas.'3

'3 An excellent example of this trend is the plan for the development of North Brabant, in the southern Netherlands. This province has an exceptionally high birth rate (1949-1950, 29.0 per iooo) and So years ago suffered from extreme poverty and agricultural underemployment. It was in order to draw on this reservoir of labor that Philips established its plant at Eindhoven and that other industries have located in the smaller towns. But the province is still faced with the prospect of an increase in its total population by one-third by 1970 and must therefore be provided with further job opportunities and improvements in its level of living. The planners determined the exact location of the "depressed areas" that had the highest population increases and the greatest agricultural underemployment. In these areas they have selected lesser centers for further development of industry and service so that each center has a tributary area of about six kilometers free from the competition of the fields of other such centers. See "Ontwikkelingsplan voor Noord-Brabant: A Development Plan" (Provinciaal Bestuur van Noord- Brabant ['s Hertogenbosch, 1950]; in Dutch and English).



the geography of commuting: the netherlands and belgium

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