REGARDS SCIENTIFIQUES CROISÉS SUR LA HIÉRARCHIE DES SYSTÈMES DE PEUPLEMENT: DE L’EMPIRIE AUX SYSTÈMES COMPLEXES

Lena Sanders ()
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Lena Sanders: UMR Géographie-cités

Region et Developpement, 2012, vol. 36, 127-146

Abstract: The hierarchical organization of human settlements is a key-subject for various studies from different scientific areas in regional science such as economics, geography, sociology or even archeology. The aim of this paper is to consider contributions from different scientific fields in order to build a theoretical framework for understanding the Zipf law for cities. Firstly, it shows that historical factors should be included when analyzing the evolution of urban systems, which should be seen as complex systems. This goes along when examining the validity or not of a distributional form for cities’ sizes such as the Pareto or the lognormal. Secondly, the paper simulates urban growth patterns that lead, under certain conditions, on city-size distribution that obeys the Zipf’s law for cities. This contribution focuses on urban hierarchies and settlements distributions on different scales, time-periods and environment.

Keywords: HUMAN SETTLEMENTS; ZIPF’S LAW; COMPLEX SYSTEMS; SPATIAL INTERACTION; ARCHEOLOGY (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B29 C23 C38 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tou:journl:v:36:y:2012:p:127-146

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