A Spatial and Temporal Autocorrelated Growth Model for City Rank—Size Distribution

Abstract

Rank—size distribution has been an important tool in characterising and analysing city size distributions across spatial and temporal scales. Zipf’s law in city rank—size distribution has been observed in many analyses and is considered an important empirical regularity describing the organisation of cities. Based on analyses of the evolution of cities in Texas from 1850 to 2000, this paper documents spatial and temporal autocorrelation in city population growth rates. A modelling strategy has been developed that accounts for the spatial and temporal autocorrelated growth in Texas cities and is effective in reconstructing the empirical rank—size distribution. This study shows that it is necessary to take into account the interdependence among cities in simulating the city size distribution.

Does City Location Determine Urban Population Growth? The Case of Small and Medium Cities in Korea

“…This distance is considered as appropriate in the context of the daily urban system in which urban residents can easily perform daily activities such as commuting or shopping (e.g. Portnov & Schwartz 2009a; Xu & Harriss 2010).…”

“…A more formal way to treat adjacency is to use spatial statistics. Analyses using this tool proved that adjacency is a significant locational factor explaining growth by detecting spatial autocorrelation (Xu & Harriss 2010), or dependency (Cheshire & Magrini 2009), in the spatial distribution of urban population growth.…”

“…In such cases, cutoff distance is set instead and the influence of cities only within this spatial range can be considered. The cutoff distance used has a variety of values ranging between 20 and 80 kilometres (Portnov & Pearlmutter 1999; Portnov 2004; Cheshire & Magrini 2006; Portnov & Schwartz 2009a; Xu & Harriss 2010). The wide range of this value is ascribed not just to the difference in the type of influence considered, but the difference in the land size and the arrangement of cities by countries.…”

Re-examination of Zipf’s law and urban dynamic in China: a regional approach

“…2006; Rozenfeld et al 2009;Xu and Zhu 2009;Xu and Harriss 2010). The study of the city-size distribution is mainly conducted for entire countries, while such phenomenon is also studied in individual regions of a country, regardless of the type of defined regions (Giesen and Südekum 2011).…”

Un modelo flexible para la simulación de distribución de ciudades

“…En este trabajo hemos propuesto CityCa, un modelo flexible y abierto basado en autómatas celulares para intentar explicar esta distribución. A diferencia de la mayoría de los modelos propuestos [5,18], la distribución de los tamaños de las ciudades en CityCA es una propiedad emergente y no impuesta. Además, CityCA puede ser fácilmente personalizado para adaptarse a nuevos espacios geográficos (por ejemplo, países).…”