Demography and the emergence of universal patterns in urban | ResearchBunny

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Abstract

This paper develops a demographic framework to explain the statistical distribution of city sizes, addressing the limitations of Zipf's law. It demonstrates how migration flows and vital rates determine various city size distributions, deriving Zipf's law and other distributions under specific conditions. The framework resolves puzzles associated with deviations from Zipf's law by incorporating concepts of choice, symmetry, information, and selection.

Publisher

Nature Communications

Published On

Sep 11, 2020

Authors

Luís M. A. Bettencourt, Daniel Zünd

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