Common power laws for cities and spatial fractal structures

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Tomoya MoriWen-Tai Hsu

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.

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Oct 9, 2002·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Soon-Hyung YookAlbert-Laszlo Barabasi
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Citations

Jan 23, 2021·PloS One·Haroldo V RibeiroDiego Rybski
Feb 24, 2021·APMIS : Acta Pathologica, Microbiologica, Et Immunologica Scandinavica·Andreas Eilersen, Kim Sneppen
May 8, 2021·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Xiaolong GengMichel C Boufadel
Nov 19, 2020·Chemical Engineering Journal·Xiaolong GengMichel C Boufadel

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