The Pan-European Population Distribution Across Consistently Defined Functional Urban Areas

Abstract

We analyze the first data set on consistently defined functional urban areas in Europe and compare the European to the US urban system. City sizes in Europe do not follow a power law: the largest cities are "too small" to follow Zipf's law.

Inequality and city size: An analysis for OECD functional urban areas

“…FUAs have the advantage of at least partially overcoming a list of problems associated with de jure spatial units (Stimson 2016) and to maximise comparability across countries and jurisdictions. FUAs have been used in several studies analysing different issues of urban development, including city size distribution (Schmidheiny and Suedekum 2015;Veneri 2016), urban spatial structure (Veneri 2018;OECD 2018), or agglomeration economies (Ahrend et al 2017), among others.…”

Zipf’s law and city size distribution: A survey of the literature and future research agenda

“…Another major support in favor of Zipf's law comes from the studies who argue that a proper definition of the city should be used. This literature shows that empirical validation of Zipf's law is sensitive to the definition of cities [12,14,19,36,37,63,[108][109][110][111][112]. Though different authors have used different words to define overall the literature has used three types of city definitions: administratively defined cities [14], functionally defined cities [19,37,111,112] and natural cities [36,109,110].…”

“…This literature shows that empirical validation of Zipf's law is sensitive to the definition of cities [12,14,19,36,37,63,[108][109][110][111][112]. Though different authors have used different words to define overall the literature has used three types of city definitions: administratively defined cities [14], functionally defined cities [19,37,111,112] and natural cities [36,109,110]. This literature has shown that Zipf's law offers a better fit to city size distribution when cities are defined as functionally defined urban areas rather than the administratively defined cities, and a pure form of Zipf's law is observed if the cities are measured as natural cites.…”

“…Some multi-country studies have examined Zipf's law for functionally defined or natural cities. For former definition, the studies have used the functional urban areas data that stems from a collaboration of the European Commission (EC) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) [111]. EC-OECD defined functional urban areas are identified by partitioning the earth surface into 1km 2 grid cells.…”

“…Addition of contiguous local administrative units makes up a larger urban zone, while addition of non-contiguous local administrative units, with 15% workers working in urban centre, makes up a polycentric larger urban zone. Based on this approach, Schmidheiny and Suedekum [111] use data of 692 functional urban areas of 31 European countries and find that the size distribution of these areas does not follow Zipf's law when these areas are consider as one group. They argue that the largest European cities are too small to follow Zipf's law.…”