The Area and Population of Cities: New Insights from a Different Perspective on Cities
Publication information:
Gabaix, Makse, Rozenfeld, Rybski. The Area and Population of Cities: New Insights from a Different Perspective on Cities. American Economic Review. 2011;101(5):2205–2225.
Abstract
We build cities "from the bottom up" by clustering areas obtained from high-resolution data, and find that a beautiful Zipf's law for population and for areas, for cities about 12,000 inhabitants in the USA and 5,000 inhabitants in Great Britain.