Reconsidering Zipf’s law for regional development: The case of settlements and cities in Croatia

Abstract

Zipf’s law is a striking regularity in the field of urban economics that states that the sizes of cities should follow the rank-size distribution. Rank-size distribution, or the rank-size rule, is a commonly observed statistical relationship between the population size and population rank of a nations’ cities. The goal of this paper is to test Zipf’s law as applied to data for settlements and cities in Croatia using the Census of Population Survey for the year 2011. The results of the analysis have shown that Zipf’s law for settlements in Croatia holds true for the majority of the settlement sizes. However, the rank-size distribution does not hold true for extremely small and extremely large settlement sizes. When city proper and urban agglomeration of 127 Croatian cities were examined, Zipf’s law was found to hold true only for urban agglomerations. The results of the study are discussed in terms of regional development.

Future urban development scenarios for post-conflict Syria. How will returning refugees shape the future?

“…The Zipf approximation ranks cities by population (from the highest to lowest) and compares them to the "ideal Zipf approximation," which assumes the size of the first city should be twice the size of the second city, and triple the size of the third city, and so on. This paper follows several studies which have applied Zipf's Law for cities (Josic & Bašić, 2018;Arshad et al, 2019;Gabaix, 1999;Gan et al, 2006;Giesen & Südekum, 2011;Ioannides & Overman, 2003;Soo, 2005) to test whether the scenarios' potential urban settlement patterns align with the ideal Zipf approximatio.…”

Study on Fractal Characteristics of Migration-Population Flow—Evidence from Egypt

“…In the formula, TPi and TRi represent the total population size and rank of the i-th city, TP1 represents the total population size of the first city (city 1), and q1 represents the elastic coefficient (constant). Empirical studies in many countries have proven that the urban population size is subject to Zipf's law [70,71], including America [72][73][74], China [75][76][77], Canada [78], Germany [79], Denmark [80], Croatia [81], Netherlands [82], Polish [83], Malaysia [84], India [85], South Africa [86], and Turkey [87].…”

Rural-Urban Integration and Spatial Planning in Edo State, Nigeria

“…• There is the need for cohesion policies in the planning of employments, economic investments, and social infrastructure. The spread of these across regional space will lead to the redressing of spatial imbalance in population and development (Josic & Basic, 2018).…”