Related papers: Recursive Subdivision of Urban Space and Zipf's la…
Zipf's law of city-size distributions can be expressed by three types of mathematical models: one-parameter form, two-parameter form, and three-parameter form. The one-parameter and one of the two-parameter models are familiar to urban…
The empirical studies of city-size distribution show that Zipf's law and the hierarchical scaling law are linked in many ways. The rank-size scaling and hierarchical scaling seem to be two different sides of the same coin, but their…
The rank-size regularity known as Zipf's law is one of scaling laws and frequently observed within the natural living world and in social institutions. Many scientists tried to derive the rank-size scaling relation by entropy-maximizing…
Power law distributions characterise several natural and social phenomena. The Zipf law for cities is one of those. The study views the question of whether that global regularity is independent of different spatial distributions of cities.…
A new angle of view is proposed to find the simple rules dominating complex systems and regular patterns behind random phenomena such as cities. Hierarchy of cities reflects the ubiquitous structure frequently observed in the natural world…
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,…
We address the role of multiplicative stochastic processes in modeling the occurrence of power-law city size distributions. As an explanation of the result of Zipf's rank analysis, Simon's model is presented in a mathematically elementary…
The law of allometric scaling based on Zipf distributions can be employed to research hierarchies of cities in a geographical region. However, the allometric patterns are easily influenced by random disturbance from the noises in…
This paper proposes a new method to analyze the spatial structure of urban systems using ideas from fractals. Regarding a system of cities as a set of "particles" distributed randomly on a triangular lattice, we construct a spatial…
We study the distribution of neighborhoods across a set of 12 global cities and find that the distribution of neighborhood sizes follows exponential decay across all cities under consideration. We are able to analytically show that this…
We report about universality of rank-integration distributions of open spaces in city space syntax similar to the famous rank-size distributions of cities (Zipf's law). We also demonstrate that the degree of choice an open space represents…
Urban scaling and Zipf's law are two fundamental paradigms for the science of cities. These laws have mostly been investigated independently and are often perceived as disassociated matters. Here we present a large scale investigation about…
We study rank-size distribution of cities in Japan on the basis of data analysis. From the census data after World War II, we find that the rank-size distribution of cities is composed of two parts, each of which has independent power…
The rank-size distribution of cities follows Zipf's law, and the Zipf scaling exponent often tends to a constant 1. This seems to be a general rule. However, a recent numerical experiment shows that there exists a contradiction between the…
Human development has far-reaching impacts on the surface of the globe. The transformation of natural land cover occurs in different forms and urban growth is one of the most eminent transformative processes. We analyze global land cover…
Zipf's law for cities is probably the most famous regularity in social sciences. So much that, a hundred years of publication later, its status is not clear: is it a law of social organisation? Is it an instrument of description of city…
We present a broad, phenomenological picture of the distribution of the length of open space linear segments, $l$, derived from maps of 36 cities in 14 different countries. By scaling the Zipf plot of $l$, we obtain two master curves for a…
The science of cities seeks to understand and explain regularities observed in the world's major urban systems. Modelling the population evolution of cities is at the core of this science and of all urban studies. Quantitatively, the most…
The rank-size plots of a large number of different physical and socio-economic systems are usually said to follow Zipf's law, but a unique framework for the comprehension of this ubiquitous scaling law is still lacking. Here we show that a…
City size distributions are known to be well approximated by power laws across a wide range of countries. But such distributions are also meaningful at other spatial scales, such as within certain regions of a country. Using data from…