City Size Distribution in China: Are Large Cities Dominant?

Large cities are less green

We study how urban quality evolves as a result of carbon dioxide emissions as urban agglomerations grow. We employ a bottom-up approach combining two unprecedented microscopic data on population and carbon dioxide emissions in the continental US. We first aggregate settlements that are close to each other into cities using the City Clustering Algorithm (CCA) defining cities beyond the administr...

The Size Distribution of Chinese Cities

This paper uses Chinese urban data to investigate two important issues regarding city size distribution: the nature in which cities of different size grow relative to each other, and which distribution is the best approximation of city size distribution. First, we examine how cities of different sizes grow relative to each other. While most empirical literatures suggest that relative size and r...

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...

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...

CORRIGENDUM: Large cities are less green