Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
1008645 | Cities | 2012 | 7 Pages |
Abstract
Four phases of interest in the distribution of city sizes are identified and current conflict in the literature is shown to be a consequence of poorly-selected units of observation. When urban regions are properly defined, US urban growth obeys Gibrat’s Law and the city size distribution is strictly Zipfian rank-size with coefficient q = 1.0. Care has to be taken with definition of the largest urban-economic regions, however; the fit in the upper tail of the distribution is best when they are recognized to be megalopolitan in scale.
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Authors
Brian J.L. Berry, Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn,