Journal
JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHICAL SYSTEMS
Volume 13, Issue 1, Pages 87-100Publisher
SPRINGER HEIDELBERG
DOI: 10.1007/s10109-010-0132-6
Keywords
Zipf's law; City size distribution; Urbanization process
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It is largely accepted among geographers and economists that the City Size Distribution (CSD) is well described by a power law, i.e., Zipf's law. This opinion is shared by this community in a manner it could be treated as a paradigm. In reality, however, Zipf's law is not always observed (even as an approximation), and we prefer to adopt a classification of the CSD into three classes. In this work, we present the characteristics of these classes and give some examples for them. We use the Israeli system of cities as an interesting case study in which the same ensemble of cities passes from one class to another. We relate this change to the urbanization process that occurred in Israel from the 1960s onwards.
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