Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

3-2020

Abstract

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 China, France, Germany, India, Japan, and the United States, we first document that large cities are significantly more spaced out than would be expected by chance alone. We next construct spatial hierarchies for countries by first partitioning geographic space using a given number of their largest cities as cell centers and then continuing this partitioning procedure within each cell recursively. We find that city-size distributions in different parts of these spatial hierarchies exhibit power laws that are, again, far more similar than would be expected by chance alone—suggesting the existence of a spatial fractal structure.

Keywords

City size, Fractal structure, Power law, Spatial hierarchy

Discipline

Growth and Development | Industrial Organization | Regional Economics

Research Areas

Applied Microeconomics

Publication

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Volume

117

Issue

12

First Page

6469

Last Page

6475

ISSN

0027-8424

Identifier

10.1073/pnas.1913014117

Publisher

National Academy of Sciences

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1913014117

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