Metropolitan Evolution, Sectoral Economic Change, and the City Size Distribution

Abstract

Metropolitan evolution is conceptualised from a broad, long term perspective that focuses on demographic and sectoral economic variables. ]Emphasis is placed on understanding these changes from a process-oriented approach that considers its general relevance rather than its outcomes or microanalytic details. A selective review of the literature provides a significant perspective and background on the stages model that is applied to the study of metropolitan change . This is then related to the Pareto city size distribution by considering the interurban population distribution coefficient and its expected performance over the various phases of metropolitan evolution . A hypothetical interurban manufacturing employment distribution coefficient, analogous to the Pareto population coefficient, is also considered and is related to the process of metropolitan and interurban sectoral economic change . The relationship between metropolitan change and national urban size distribution is viewed as a significant component of the emerging hierarchy of global metropolitan cities in both advanced and developing nations .

Peri-urban transformation in the Jakarta metropolitan area

“…3). As has been discussed elsewhere (Suarez-Villa, 1988), this trend involves a maturity phase in metropolitan development, following by a declining contribution of the secondary sector, while the tertiary sector increases.…”

Drivers of Agglomeration: Geography vs History

“…We aim to uncover the location patterns and the timing of these patterns from the eleven censuses conducted in the 20 th century, although we are aware we have no general explanatory model for the origins of population agglomerations in certain places, and their subsequent dynamics. In contrast to the work of other scholars ( [8,9,13,14] for the Spanish case; and [15,7,[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] for other countries), our interest does not lie solely in urban agglomerations or large cities. Rather, our analysis in this paper includes the smaller municipalities, of limited importance in terms of population figures but significant in number and land surface area [25].…”

City Size Distribution as a Function of Socioeconomic Conditions: An Eclectic Approach to Downscaling Global Population

“…One of them is that the approach built on Zipf's law lacks theoretical foundations (Carroll, 1982;Suarez-Villa, 1988;Fujita et al, 1999). Zipf's law is no more than a simple presentation of empirical rank-size regularities, which in itself does not provide any explanation of the main drivers underlying such regularities.…”