Explanation of Spatial Structure with Emphasis on Morphological and Functional Approaches to Polycentricity of Urban Region

Background: Early decentralization and changes in information technology, transportation, and communications led to major structural changes in cities that led to the emergence of polycentric urban region (PUR). In recent years, however, polycentric urban development has become an important topic of discussion among urban researchers, geographers, planners, economists, and urban policymakers, and each has addressed and defined it from its own perspective. Objectives: The purpose of this study is to examine the theoretical approaches of polycentricism and explain it from the perspective of related concepts and approaches to explain a conceptual framework for understanding the spatial structure. Method: These operational concepts and definitions were derived from theoretical discussions, which included the first step, planning. Research sources were examined based on the world's most authoritative scientific database. In the second step, resource retrieval was performed based on keywords, title and abstract, and finally, in the third step, analysis and conceptual model were developed. Result: The findings of the analysis showed that the concept of polycentric can be explained based on the dimension of intra-urban and inter-urban geographical scale and the nature of analysis and prescriptive. Studies have also shown that the functional polycentric urban area is less well understood than the morphological. The morphological approach is based on population, activity, or employment, and the functional approach emphasizes infrastructure networks, flows, and interactions between urban nodes as inter-city relationships, distance, daily traffic, and network activity. The distribution of currents in this approach can be one-way or two-way. Also, urban systems with spatial integration may have a functional structure, be unbalanced, and on the other hand, functionally balanced urban systems may have weak or strong spatial integrity. Conclusion: For polycentric urban region, the four dimensions of analytical-descriptive research to show, measure, and determine the status quo of a spatial structure are a conceptual dimension for the spatial configuration of such a structure, the spatial dimension for the realization of an analytical conceptual dimension. Prescription and functional dimension and morphology are recognizable.