Multilevel comparison of large urban systems

Abstract

For the first time the systems of cities in seven countries or regions among the largest in the world (China, India, Brazil, Europe, the Former Soviet Union (FSU), the United States and South Africa) are made comparable through the building of spatio-temporal standardised statistical databases. We first explain the concept of a generic evolutionary urban unit ("city") and its necessary adaptations to the information provided by each national statistical system. Second, the hierarchical structure and the urban growth process are compared at macro-scale for the seven countries with reference to Zipf's and Gibrat's model: in agreement with an evolutionary theory of urban systems, large similarities shape the hierarchical structure and growth processes in BRICS countries as well as in Europe and United States, despite their positions at different stages in the urban transition that explain some structural peculiarities. Third, the individual trajectories of some 10,000 cities are mapped at micro-scale following a cluster analysis of their evolution over the last fifty years. A few common principles extracted from the evolutionary theory of urban systems can explain the diversity of these trajectories, including a specific pattern in their geographical repartition in the Chinese case. We conclude that the observations at macro-level when summarized as stylised facts can help in designing simulation models of urban systems whereas the urban trajectories identified at micro-level are consistent enough for constituting the basis of plausible future population projections.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures; Pumain, Denise, et al. "Multilevel comparison of large urban systems." Cybergeo: European Journal of Geography (2015

Conclusion: Perspectives on Urban Theories

“…The first part of this concluding chapter is a selection of salient points from our evolutionary theory of urban systems that are discussed in several of the chapters. As many of our results were already published (Pumain et al 2015;Cura et al 2017;Pumain & Reuillon 2017) 2 it was possible to confirm them, or to bring more different evidence or contradictory views. For each of these lively research questions, we report the convergent opinions that emerged from the topics discussed, as well as the open and even controversial perspectives for future work.…”

The Old and the New: Qualifying City Systems in the World with Classical Models and New Data

“…In a previous paper using about the same data sets, we have compared the shape of the urban hierarchical organization in each country or world region and classified the trajectories of cities with respect to the evolution of their population (Pumain et al ). In the present article, we concentrate on Zipf's and Gibrat's models and investigate further the related statistical evidence about the urban growth process and its connection with urban hierarchies.…”

Systemic Analysis of Food Supply and Distribution Systems in City-Region Systems—An Examination of FAO’s Policy Guidelines towards Sustainable Agri-Food Systems

“…Several studies have demonstrated that specific historical events in urban systems are required to understand the size, distribution and infrastructure development, which affect the "universal change" from rural isolated areas to diversified, concentrated and hierarchized urban settlements. [11][12][13]. A similar explanation is provided in Allen [11] referring to the rank size rule by [14] about the interaction of urban settlements where explanation of growth is economic competition and another is the appearance of industrial satellites and wealthy housing buildings attracting population.…”