An evolutionary theory for interpreting urban scaling laws Une théorie évolutive pour expliquer les lois d'échelle dans les systèmes de villes

By D. Pumain, Fabien Paulus, Céline Vacchiani-Marcuzzo, J. Lobo. 2006

195 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We try here to illustrate the relevance of an evolutionary theory of urban systems for explaining their hierarchical properties. The largest cities became larger because they were successful in adopting many successive innovations. Larger cities capture innovations in a continuous way (through adaptation, imitation, anticipation), and they concentrate a larger part of anything « new » at any time. Their functions demonstrate a higher level of complexity or sophistication of their urban activity and society. The most advanced technologies concentrate in largest cities, the common place activities are ubiquitous, whereas old ones remain in small towns only (or, in economic terms, there are increasing, constant or decreasing returns to urban scale). Such regularities can be expressed in the form of scaling laws that were recognised as revealing specific constraints on the structure and evolution of complex systems in physics and biology. Approaching urban activities by scaling laws provides a linkage between the concepts of urban function, city size, and innovation cycles. Over time, there is a substitution among the activities of the largest cities, where the oldest technologies and professions are replaced by the new ones, while the old ones are relatively concentrating in the smallest towns. Such an evolution is observed within urban systems where cities are fully connected and interdependent. There are processes of cooperation through exchanges of information and learning that enable an incremental diffusion of innovation and a continuous adaptation of urban activities and society in all parts of the system. Meanwhile, there are also processes of competition between cities that enhance their capacity to innovate and to levy the benefits of innovation. A distributed process of urban growth including a slight but continuing advantage for the largest cities is the result of that competitive process, while the successive adaptation of the urban functions follows the economic and social innovation cycles.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Environmental Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d72fdef7c39f678da7e75d94e6326857a52d04c9

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Citations in the corpus

A theoretical framework for evolutionary economic geography: industrial dynamics and urban growth as a branching process (2007, background): “We thus have implicitly assumed that the spatial distribution of functional divisions follows from product divisions, which is unlikely to be the case, because functional divisions are overrepresented in large cities (Castells, 1996; Pumain et al., 2006).”
Industrial Dynamics and Clusters: A Survey (2015, methodology): “In a more recent study using employment data for French cities, PUMAIN et al. (2006) found that during the period 1960–2000 electronics, chemicals, textiles, metal products, machinery and equipment, and wood, pulp and paper industries all progressively relocated from the metropolitan cities to…”