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

By Hernán D. Rozenfeld, Diego Rybski, Xavier Gabaix, Hernán A. Makse. 2010

421 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The distribution of the population of cities has attracted a great deal of attention, in part because it sharply constrains models of local growth. However, to this day, there is no consensus on the distribution below the very upper tail, because available data need to rely on the "legal" rather than "economic" definition of cities for medium and small cities. To remedy this difficulty, in this work we construct cities "from the bottom up" by clustering populated areas obtained from high-resolution data. This method allows us to investigate the population and area of cities for urban agglomerations of all sizes. We find that Zipf's law (a power law with exponent close to 1) for population holds for cities as small as 12,000 inhabitants in the USA and 5,000 inhabitants in Great Britain. In addition the distribution of city areas is also close to a Zipf's law. We provide a parsimonious model with endogenous city area that is consistent with those findings.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5a79870dcde9d2cedad512dc48a215ed0e808b6d

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In Economics and Econometrics

Citations in the corpus

US city size distribution: Robustly Pareto, but only in the tail (2013, methodology): “We obtain qualitatively similar results for the upper tail with the Area Clusters data of Rozenfeld et al. (2011), and the US Census combined Metropolitan and Micropolitan Areas data, though the shape of the distribution at smaller sizes is sensitive to the definition used.”
Power Laws in Economics: An Introduction (2016, methodology): “Rozenfeld et al. (2011) address the problem using a new algorithm that constructs the population of small cities from fine-grained geographical data.”
City Age and City Size (2014, background): “7We have verified the result by Rozenfeld et al. (2011).”
Size distributions for all cities: Which one is best? (2013, methodology): “1 Zipf’s law also holds at the level of cities belonging to regions (Giesen and Suedekum, 2011) or when cities are defined as actual economic areas using different methods (Rozenfeld et al., 2011; Berry and Okulicz-Kozaryn, 2012).”
Evidence for the homothetic scaling of urban forms (2018, methodology): “This result can be related to the proportionality between area and population found by Rozenfeld et al. (2011) for US and UK cities, although the methods used are quite different (a clustering algorithm and population data).”
What Can Be Learned from Spatial Economics? (2019, positive): “Using an algorithm to determine, in a consistent way, city boundaries with high-resolution geographical data, Rozenfeld et al. (2011) find that the Zipf law is a good approximation of the population distribution for Great Britain and the United States.”
CENTRAL PLACE T HEORY A ND CITY SIZE DISTRIBUTION (2012, neutral): “…and s and tail index f. Unlike most empirical work on city size distribution, which relies on city definitions that are based on administrative units, Rozenfeld et al. (2011) adopt an innovative from the bottom up approach to construct cities, i.e. population clusters, by applying a computer…”
The Growth of Cities (2013, neutral): “Rozenfeld et al. (2011) use high-resolution data for the United States and aggregate settlements that are close to each other into cities. When defined from the bottom up, they find that Zipf ’s law holds very well for cities with population above 10,000. Giesen et al. (2010) argue that, for a numbe”
The Economic Performance of European Cities and City Regions: Myths and Realities (2013, background): “On the second point, as we have already seen, there is widespread evidence pointing to Zipf’s law distributions for city-size populations, and now there is recent evidence which also suggests that Zipf’s law holds for city areas as well (Rozenfeld et al., 2011).”