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Zipf’s Law, Central Place Theory, and Sustainable Cities and City Systems

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2020) | Viewed by 7772

Special Issue Editors

Department of Urban and Economic Geography, Peking University, Beijing 100080, China
Interests: fractals; scaling analysis; spatial complexity; urban chaos; scale-free network; nonlinear dynamics; spatial analysis and modeling; fractals and scaling in cities; complex systems of cities; fractal geometry; allometric growth; self-organized networks of cities
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

One fundamental law underlying sustainable cities and city systems is Zipf’s law, a statistical regularity regarding city sizes in a country or region: The largest city is twice as big as the second largest, three times as big as the third largest, and so on. This law was named after the American linguist George Kingsley Zipf (1902–1950), who popularized it and sought to explain it through the principle of least effort (Zipf 1949), but the observation was first made by Auerbach (1913). Another important observation regarding cities or human settlements in general is central place theory (CPT) (Christaller 1933, 1966) and its variants, which are able to formulate a geometric regularity about cities in a country or region. That is, the largest cities are surrounded by some middle-sized cities, which are further surrounded by many smaller cities in some recursive manner. Both Zipf’s law and CTP have one thing in common, i.e., the scaling hierarchy of “far more smalls than larges”, either statistically or in terms of underlying spatial configuration. The underlying scaling hierarchy of “far more smalls than larges” has actually illustrated the deep insights into many sustainable cities and city systems.

We call for papers that demonstrate applications and/or further development of Zipf’s law and CPT, either to better understand cities and city systems as sustainable systems or to better plan or design them towards more sustainable or more resilient systems. We are interested in different types of papers, including research papers (case studies, comparison studies), concept papers, and review papers, as long as they are able to clarify how law and theory bring new insights into sustainability. Interdisciplinary research and comparisons are particularly welcome, for example, galaxies in comparison to cities, biological systems in comparison to city systems, and the world wide web in comparison to transport networks.

References:

Auerbach F. (1913), Das Gesetz der Bevölkerungskonzentration, Petermann's Geographische Mitteilungen, 59, 74–76.

Christaller W.  (1933, 1966), Central Places in Southern Germany, Prentice Hall: Englewood Cliffs, N. J.

Zipf G. K. (1949), Human Behaviour and the Principles of Least Effort, Addison Wesley: Cambridge, MA.

Prof. Dr. Bin Jiang
Prof. Dr. Yanguang Chen
Guest Editors

More information can be found here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336460575_CALL_FOR_PAPERS_Zipf's_Law_Central_Place_Theory_and_Sustainable
_Cities_and_City_Systems_A_Special_Issue_with_the_journal_Sustainability

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • sustainable cities
  • sustainable city systems
  • Zipf’s law
  • central place theory

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

15 pages, 5729 KiB  
Article
Economic Transition and the Evolution of City-Size Distribution of China’s Urban System
by Jiejing Wang and Yanguang Chen
Sustainability 2021, 13(6), 3287; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su13063287 - 16 Mar 2021
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 1767
Abstract
The evolution of city size distribution in China has gained a great deal of scholarly attention. However, little is known about the effect of economic transition on the reorganization of city size distribution in China. Using an urban hierarchy with cascade structure model, [...] Read more.
The evolution of city size distribution in China has gained a great deal of scholarly attention. However, little is known about the effect of economic transition on the reorganization of city size distribution in China. Using an urban hierarchy with cascade structure model, we decompose Zipf’s law into two exponential functions that provide a new way of examining the dynamic processes of urban system evolution. This study aims to investigate the dominating latent forces that affect China’s city size distribution through mathematical modeling of the hierarchical scaling laws based on census data of 1982, 1990, 2000, and 2010. A number of features of China’s city size distribution are found. First, the size distribution of Chinese cities displayed a clear trend of evolving toward the Zipf distribution, which is the result of economic transition from planned to market. Second, the rank-size pattern still deviates slightly from the standard Zipf distribution, as indicated by the narrow scaling range and departure of the scaling exponent from the theoretically expected value. We argue that the top-down state regulation is a critical cause of deviation of China’s city size distribution from Zipf’s law. Full article
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26 pages, 3178 KiB  
Article
Rank-size Distribution of Cities and Municipalities in Bangladesh
by Pankaj Bajracharya and Selima Sultana
Sustainability 2020, 12(11), 4643; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su12114643 - 06 Jun 2020
Cited by 10 | Viewed by 4507
Abstract
This paper examines and updates the rank-size distribution of cities and municipalities in Bangladesh between 1990 and 2019 based on two criteria: (1) built-up urban areas; and (2) population. The distribution of built-up urban areas and population are compared to provide a robust [...] Read more.
This paper examines and updates the rank-size distribution of cities and municipalities in Bangladesh between 1990 and 2019 based on two criteria: (1) built-up urban areas; and (2) population. The distribution of built-up urban areas and population are compared to provide a robust theoretical underpinning of Zipf’s law for future urban developmental planning framework. The data on built-up urban areas is extracted from land cover classification using Google Earth Engine and the population data is obtained from the decennial censuses. The comparison of the conformity to Zipf’s law indicated contradictory results. While a greater proportion of the population has been increasingly concentrated in the smaller and midsized cities over the last three decades, built-up urban areas, on the other hand, have been mostly clustered in two largest cities— Dhaka and Chittagong—accounting for 50 to nearly 60 percent of the total built-up urban areas. These results shed light on the magnitude of continued spatial inequalities in urban development amongst cities and municipalities in Bangladesh despite there being an overall increase of evenness in the distribution of population over time. These results imply an unsustainable rate of urban expansion in Bangladesh and reinforce the need for the exploration of policies and regulations targeted at guiding the rate and direction of evenness in urban expansion. Full article
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