Central-Place Hierarchy and City Size Distribution

Central Place Theory and City Size Distribution

This paper proposes a theory of city size distribution via a hierarchy approach rather than the popular random growth process. It does so by formalizing central place theory using an equilibrium entry model and specifying the conditions under which city size distribution follows a power law. Central place theory describes the way in which a hierarchical city system with different layers of citi...

Optimal city hierarchy: A dynamic programming approach to central place theory

Central place theory is a key building block of economic geography and an empirically plausible description of city systems. This paper provides a rationale for central place theory via a dynamic programming formulation of the social planner’s problem of city hierarchy. We show that there must be one and only one immediate smaller city between two neighboring larger-sized cities in any optimal ...

An Industrial Agglomeration Approach to Central Place and City Size Regularities

An empirical regularity designated as the Number-Average Size (NAS) Rule was first identified for the case of Japan by Mori, Nishikimi and Smith [13], and has since been extended to the US by Hsu [6]. This rule asserts a negative log-linear relation between the number and average population size of cities where a given industry is present, i.e., of industry-choice cities. Hence one of its key f...

Scaling Behavior of Chinese City Size Distribution

We have investigated the population distribution of Chinese cities from 1997 to 2006. The rank-size distributions of Chinese cities deviate from the Pareto distribution. For city size distribution of each year we can find a population threshold Pc that characterizes the boundary of the deviation. The cities with population more than Pc follow the Pareto distribution, while the smaller cities de...

Putting Hierarchy in Its Place