The Area and Population of Cities: New Insights from a Different Perspective on Cities

Abstract

The distribution of city populations has attracted much attention, in part because it constrains models of local growth. However, there is no consensus on the distribution below the very upper tail, because available data need to rely on "legal" rather than "economic" definitions for medium and small cities. To remedy this difficulty, we construct cities "from the bottom up" by clustering populated areas obtained from high-resolution data. We find that Zipf's law for population holds for cities as small as 5,000 inhabitants in Great Britain and 12,000 inhabitants in the US. We also find a Zipf's law for areas. JEL: R11, R12, R23

Exploring the evolution of London's street network in the information space: A dual approach

“…Similar conceptualizations dominated the scientific discourse during the twentieth century, epitomized by Zipf's and Gibrat's laws. While the application of these laws to city size and urban growth still remains an open problem [7,8], during the last decades fractal theory and diffusion processes found fertile applications to morphological studies of urban systems [9].…”

Urban road network evolution mechanism based on the ‘direction preferred connection’ and ‘degree constraint’

“…Rozenfeld et al found the similar result too in the process of studying the area and population of cities. They found the power-law distribution of areas with an exponent close to 1 [20]. Although the area of Ref.…”

“…Although the area of Ref. [20] is not the same as the cell enclosed by the streets, it is also meaningful for us to know the universal law of the area distribution.…”

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