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Zipf's law for all the natural cities in the United States: a geospatial perspective
University of Gävle, Faculty of Engineering and Sustainable Development, Department of Industrial Development, IT and Land Management, Urban and regional planning/GIS-institute.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-2337-2486
University of Gävle, Faculty of Engineering and Sustainable Development, Department of Industrial Development, IT and Land Management, Urban and regional planning/GIS-institute.
2011 (English)In: International Journal of Geographical Information Science, ISSN 1365-8816, E-ISSN 1365-8824, Vol. 25, no 8, p. 1269-1281Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

This article provides a new geospatial perspective on whether or not Zipf's law holds for all cities or for the largest cities in the United States using a massive dataset and its computing. A major problem around this issue is how to define cities or city boundaries. Most of the investigations of Zipf's law rely on the demarcations of cities imposed by census data, for example, metropolitan areas and census-designated places. These demarcations or definitions (of cities) are criticized for being subjective or even arbitrary. Alternative solutions to defining cities are suggested, but they still rely on census data for their definitions. In this article we demarcate urban agglomerations by clustering street nodes (including intersections and ends), forming what we call natural cities. Based on the demarcation, we found that Zipf's law holds remarkably well for all the natural cities (over 2–4 million in total) across the United States. There is little sensitivity for the holding with respect to the clustering resolution used for demarcating the natural cities. This is a big contrast to urban areas, as defined in the census data, which do not hold stable for Zipf's law.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
London, 2011. Vol. 25, no 8, p. 1269-1281
National Category
Computer and Information Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:hig:diva-10313DOI: 10.1080/13658816.2010.510801ISI: 000295469300004Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-80052956317OAI: oai:DiVA.org:hig-10313DiVA, id: diva2:442952
Available from: 2011-09-22 Created: 2011-09-22 Last updated: 2018-03-13Bibliographically approved

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Jiang, BinJia, Tao

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CiteExportLink to record
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Citation style
  • apa
  • harvard-cite-them-right
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
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Language
  • sv-SE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
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  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • de-DE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
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  • asciidoc
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