Spanish and Argentine scientists have investigated the way in which people group together on a large scale and have identified that, at least in the distribution of the Spanish population by provinces, it is governed by theprinciple of maximum entropy. This implies that how we organize obeys patterns that can be predicted mathematically.
According to the SINC agency, the principle establishes that, once the conditions are known –in this case the evolution of the population of all municipalities–, theThe equilibrium distribution of the system for each of the provinces is the one that maximizes the amount of information or entropy, a physical quantity that describes how irreversible the system is. Scientists have used thevalue “q”. to summarize the socioeconomic characteristics of each province and quantify how large population centers grow compared to small ones. Its typical value is 1, and it reflects that the population increase in a municipality during the last year is proportional to its number of inhabitants in the previous year.
However, when q is greater than 1 it means thatlarge municipalities or cities in a province grow at a higher rate than its small municipalities or towns. This is reflected in the data for the case of León, for example, or those of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and Huesca.
This is the general trend in most provinces, reflecting the progressive abandonment of the countryside to live in the cities. In fact, the average value of ‘q’ in the Spanish territory is 1.2. On the contrary, when q is less than 1, the interpretation is more complex. It can reflect thatthe towns of a province have grown in greater proportion than its cities, as in the case of Guipúzcoa, but the particular way in which municipalities with different tendencies are grouped also intervenes.
According to the data, a mixture of two phenomena is taking place in Madrid and Barcelona. On the one hand, very small towns are being abandoned, but on the other, the city is becoming saturated. In this way, it is the medium-sized nuclei that, relatively, are growing at a higher rate.
