ABSTRACT
The concept of spatial elasticity refers to the rate of municipal expansion (or contraction) in land area. This concept defines a general classification of bound ary change for local governance structures in metropolitan areas. Beyond classificatory description, this idea also applies to a wide variety of theories of territorial control and expansion (Austin 1999), geographic or spatial models (Kollman, Miller, and Page 1997), jurisdictional immobility assumptions in location models (Henderson 1991), and forms of boundary partitioning and partitioning mles (Wooders 1999). Spatial elasticity is a measurable concept, broadly defined to incorporate any rate of substitution in area.
