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The high share of impermeable surfaces in cities modifies the terrain characteristics that facilitate natural water flow and balance. The street network, an impervious surface on its own, is also the impetus for developing other impervious surfaces by facilitating access. The purpose of this work is to assess the interconnectedness between the underlying structural lines of the terrain and the street network for making informed decisions on locating green infrastructure to maintain water balance. For this purpose, the work measures the spatio-structural similarity between the co-located networks, assesses the variation of the measure with city size and relation to an indicator of water balance. Cross-sectional analysis is performed across a large sample of cities of varying sizes to extract generalized patterns of spatial structure and variations to size. The larger cities have low index values of spatio-structural similarity ranging between –0.2 and 0.2. The low index values for larger cities relate to the emergence of small-world properties in large street networks for functional efficiency and large street networks' web-like shape. Next, the paper identifies two zones based on the interconnectedness of the roads and the terrain. The spatial extent of a zone based on points where the arterial road intersects higher orders of drainage channels and ridgelines is associated with the number of above-normal wet conditions (SPEI ≥ 2.0) with the r-value of –0.30 at a p-value of 0.05. In summary, spatial statistics on spatial network data are helpful to extract trends inherent in the multi-layered network structure of cities to provide informed solutions. The policymakers and planners can use the spatial co-location patterns between street and terrain to make data-driven decisions to locate interventions for a nature-based resilient city.

Cities have specialised in particular urban functions throughout history, with consequential implications for urban and regional patterns of economic and social change. This specialisation takes place within overall national city size distributions and is manifest in different but often similarly variegated residential structures. Here we develop a novel and consistent methodological approach for measuring macro-scale city size and micro-scale residential differentiation using individual digital census records for the period 1881–1901. The use of family names and neighbourhood classification of dominant economic and social roles makes it possible to relate the changing city size distribution in Great Britain to patterns of urban growth and residential differentiation within urban areas. Together, we provide an integrated and consistent methodology that links the classification of all major urban area growth in Great Britain to attendant intra-urban geodemographic changes in urban residential structures. We suggest ways in which this manifests social and economic change across the settlement system for both new and long-established residents.

the quality of life (QoL) in cities has increasingly been used as a symbol of urban success. Studies addressing this issue tend to focus, however, on large cities and/or on cities from different countries. By using a set of data from a single country, comprehending cities with different population sizes and densities, observations for 11 performance dimensions, and an approach combining the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) technique and multivariate regression modeling, this study analyses the QoL of Portuguese cities and explores some of its determinants. the results of this analysis show that both small and large cities can offer high levels of QoL with "transport and accessibility," "safety," "housing," "education," and "culture and entertainment" being the dimensions that most contribute to the QoL assessment. While Lisbon and Oporto (the two largest Portuguese cities) are benchmark cities, some of the highly populated cities located in their Metropolitan Areas present the most potential for improvement in terms of QoL. the results also show that cities located in the hinterland tend to present higher QoL scores than those on the coast. Equally, cities with lower population size and density, those that are district capitals and those with higher per capita current public expenditures present higher levels of QoL. These findings suggest, therefore, that the cities' typology, their population size and density, and their dependence from local governments' public expenditures can significantly contribute to the differences identified in their QoL performance. FCT Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology European Commission [UIDB/04007/2020] info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Urban segregation is a widespread phenomenon with profound social implications, and one that presents difficult measurement challenges. Segregation indexes may be affected by scale or zoning biases of the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP). In this article, we develop a methodology that relies on spatial clustering algorithms to simultaneously cope with both kinds of MAUP biases, and we test it with complete census data for most Chilean cities. We find a robust correlation between segregation and city size, contesting previous claims about the spuriousness of this relationship. We also show that socioeconomic polarization is a widespread phenomenon in Chile and that it is not just a problem of disadvantaged groups’ concentration. Based on these results, we suggest that area-based desegregation policies should be generally reinforced, and complemented in big Chilean cities with housing-mix policies. We argue that using spatially unbiased segregation indexes could improve comparative urban studies.

In this article, the socioeconomic determinants on urban population in China are empirically investigated with a theoretical equilibrium model for city size. While much of the research on urban size focuses on the impact of agglomeration economies based on “optimal city size” theory, this model is eschewed in our research due to its theoretical paradox in the real world, and we turn instead toward an intermediate solution proposed by Camagni, Capello, and Caragliu. This equilibrium model is estimated on a sample of 111 prefectural cities in China with multiple regression and artificial neural networks. Empirical results have shown that the model explains the variance in the data very well, and all the determinants have significant impacts on Chinese city sizes. Although sample cities have reached their equilibrium sizes as a whole, there is substantially unbalanced distribution of population within the urban system, with a strong contingent of cities that are either squarely too large or too small.

Despite the increased focus on housing choices among rural–urban migrants in China, there is a lack of studies on city size and housing purchase preferences. In this paper, we extend the conceptual framework of the Rosen–Roback model to analyse how city size affects rural–urban migrants’ housing purchase intention, and find that the impact of city size on the willingness to buy a house in the host city for migrants has an inverted U shape by using the China Migrants Dynamic Survey of 2014. To explain this phenomenon, we further adopt the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition, which shows that rural–urban migrants have achieved a spatial equilibrium between housing costs and city amenities in large cities, compared with megacities and small cities. Specifically, the amenities in large cities can compensate for the negative impact of the high housing cost, making these large cities more attractive than small ones for rural–urban migrants, while rural migrants have to bear high housing prices and exclusive urban welfare because of the strict household registration system in megacities. This study thus sheds new light on the adoption of diversified housing policies to solve the housing problems of rural–urban migrants in China by considering city size.

This paper analyses residential segregation over time in Indian cities. We examine the change in caste-based segregation longitudinally, while exploring how caste dynamics manifest differently across city size and region. The paper uses successive rounds of decennial census data, from 2001 and 2011. Contrary to expectations, we find residential segregation by caste/tribe persisting or worsening in 60 per cent of cities in our all-India sample, with differences by region and city size. For example, in the states of Karnataka, Haryana, Punjab and Tamil Nadu, a majority of cities experienced decreasing levels of residential segregation by caste/tribe, while in Maharashtra and Gujarat, 34 and 29 per cent of cities, respectively, experienced an increase. A greater proportion of small cities (population 20,000–49,999) than large cities (100,000–999,999) experienced an increase in residential segregation between 2001 and 2011. Across all city-size categories, the dominant trend has been no improvement in residential segregation by caste/tribe over time.

Urban scaling laws summarise how socio-economic behaviours of urban systems may be predicted from city size. While most scaling analysis rests on using aggregate quantities (total incomes, GDP, etc.), examining distributions of these aggregate quantities (e.g. income distributions) could shed light on how socio-economic inequalities may correlate or be causally linked to city size. In this direction, this paper examines how geographic distributions and spatial inequalities of income and housing costs vary by city size. The paper presents three principal results. First, it brings out qualitative implications of quantitative scaling by relating scaling of the distributions of income and housing costs to their specific geographic concentrations. Second, it shows that some small and medium sized cities are clear outliers, showing behaviour similar to the largest cities and starkly different from the behaviours of the bulk of small and medium sized cities. Third, this above observation explains why heteroscedasticity, or large and heterogeneous fluctuations, are frequently observed in urban indicator data when plotted as a function of city size. Putting together these three results, overall, it is shown that income distributions and housing costs scale and concentrate in cities by size in a predictable way, where the largest cities superlinearly/disproportionately agglomerate the highest income earners and the highest housing costs, and show relatively lower concentrations of low-middle income earners and low-medium housing costs. In contrast, most of the smaller and medium sized cities show a ‘flipped’ opposite trend. A few small and medium sized cities are outliers: they show trends that match those of the largest cities, due to specialisations of economic functions or concentrations of high-paying occupations in these cities. The empirical findings lead to a discussion on the objective and normative relationships between city size and urban inequalities. It is suggested that due to the concentrations of high income and high housing costs, largest cities may have a resulting housing market structure that will push out lower and medium income earners, thereby making affordability, diversity, and socio-spatial justice emerge as important urban policy issues.

The paper examines the growth of Chinese cities at prefecture level or above by first applying a non-parametric method. Kernel regression of the mean of growth rate conditional on city size reveals a U-shaped relationship between city growth and size, and rejects Gibrat’s law. That is to say that large cities take the form of divergent growth while small cities are convergent to each other. This U-shaped growth–size relationship holds for the registered ( hukou) population in 1989–2012 as well as for the permanent population in 1999–2012. Furthermore, our results show that the growth of large cities becomes more divergent using the permanent population than using the hukou population, whereas the growth of small cities becomes less convergent. The permanent population counts a portion of floating population, so it is then concluded that rural–urban migrants move to large cities disproportionately, making large cities grow faster than small cities. Estimated results from rank–size OLS regression confirm the divergent growth of large cities, and, at the same time, reject the notion of random growth of Chinese cities (which is also supported by panel root tests). Our findings have profound policy implications. The national strategy of urbanization that stresses the growth control of mega and super-big cities has had no effect in the past and may continue to be ineffective in shaping the urbanization trajectory in China in the next couple of decades. Sustainable urbanization will depend largely on whether and how well big Chinese cities prepare themselves in accommodating fast growth.

Developing a scientific understanding of cities in a fast urbanizing world is essential for planning sustainable urban systems. Recently, it was shown that income and wealth creation follow increasing returns, scaling superlinearly with city size. We study scaling of per capita incomes for separate census defined income categories against population size for the whole of Australia. Across several urban area definitions, we find that lowest incomes grow just linearly or sublinearly (β = 0.94 to 1.00), whereas highest incomes grow superlinearly (β = 1.00 to 1.21), with total income just superlinear (β = 1.03 to 1.05). These findings show that as long as total or aggregate income scaling is considered, the earlier finding is supported: the bigger the city, the richer the city, although the scaling exponents for Australia are lower than those previously reported for other countries. But, we find an emergent scaling behavior with regard to variation in income distribution that sheds light on socio-economic inequality: the larger the population size and densities of a city, while lower incomes grow proportionately or less than proportionately, higher incomes grow more quickly, suggesting a disproportionate agglomeration of incomes in the highest income categories in big cities. Because there are many more people on lower incomes that scale sublinearly as compared to the highest that scale superlinearly, these findings suggest an empirical observation on inequality: the larger the population, the greater the income agglomeration in the highest income categories. The implications of these findings are qualitatively discussed for various income categories, with respect to living costs and access to opportunities and services that big cities provide.

Hosting a mega-event is a costly activity of short duration. Still, cities frequently compete to become host of all types of events. This paper examines the effect of staging the largest and most important sporting event in the world, the Summer Olympic Games, on the host city. Applying a difference-in-differences methodology, we analyse the population size of Olympic cities, candidate cities and other large cities in host and candidate countries over the period from 1860 to 2010. We find that, following the Games, host cities do not experience a measurable increase in population size relative to cities in the control group. On the contrary, to the extent that any effect of hosting the Games is identifiable, our results indicate that being awarded the Summer Olympics has a negative impact on cities.

Since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, China’s urban development policies have experienced dramatic changes, from anti-urbanisation before 1978, to anti-large-city-development during 1978–1999 and coordinated urbanisation in 2000–2012. Using city-level data from 1949 to 2012, this paper examines China’s development policies and city size distribution. Evidenced by the Zipf coefficient, we found that China’s city sizes became more evenly distributed before 2000, and this pattern was reversed after 2000. These findings suggest that China’s urban system is strongly affected by its shifting urban development strategies.

Identifying the factors that influence the body image of body builders is important for understanding this construct. The aim of this study was to analyze the association between body image and age, socioeconomic status, and place of residence of body builders from two cities in Brazil. A cross-sectional study of 301 body builders with an average age of 25.2 yr. ( SD = 3.5) was carried out. The Muscle Silhouette Measure scale was used, in which the discrepancy between current and desired silhouette was examined. Older body builders showed greater discrepancy between current and desired silhouette, reflecting their desire for a more muscular body.

Like their larger counterparts, smaller cities use public funds to build facilities to host local sports franchises. One argument for doing so is the new economic activity and attendance new facilities generate. However, academic research examining both major league stadium/arenas and minor league baseball stadiums finds a novelty effect – a brief period of higher attendance – exists but not a long-term sustainable increase for new facilities. This paper extends the research on small cities and novelty effects of sports facilities by integrating and exploring how city size and proximity influences the novelty effect of new hockey arenas in smaller communities. Results show a novelty effect for new facilities built to host Canadian Hockey League franchises for the first five years. In small cities, the novelty effect occurs only in years three through five after opening.

This study tackles the description of the size distribution of urban employment centers or, in other words, the size of areas within cities with significantly high densities of workers. Certainly, there exists a branch of urban economics that has paid substantial attention to urban employment centers, but the efforts have been focused on identification methodologies. In this paper we build on such body of research and combine it with insights from the latest contributions in the sister subfield of city size distributions to push the agenda forward in terms of the understanding of these phenomena. We consider the 359 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) in the United States in the year 2000 and reach three main conclusions: first, employment center sizes are more unevenly distributed than city sizes; second, the two functions that best describe city size distributions, namely the lognormal and the double Pareto–lognormal, also offer a good fit for the case of centers, particularly the latter; and third, several interesting statistically significant relationships (correlations) between variables related to centers and MSAs are deduced. Further experiments with a different technique of center identification suggest that the results are fairly robust to the method of choice. Keywords: urban employment centers, US metropolitan areas, size distribution

Noted scholars have argued that urbanisation in India is dysfunctional, sans industrialisation, dependent on a largely informal tertiary sector and totally unsustainable ( Bhalla, 2004 ). I posit in this article that whatever the nature of urbanisation—'top heavy', tertiarised and sans industrialisation—India needs to promote urbanisation since we can demonstrate that poverty is better fought through urbanisation than by only focussing on rural development programmes and the population living in 600,000 small and scattered villages and hamlets which are unlikely to attract substantial private investment in public infrastructure. I argue in this article that there is a need to shift the policy focus to promoting urban growth, albeit the segment of the academia that discourses on over-urbanisation in India. The situation wherein the agricultural sector which has a share of 60 per cent employment and 25 per cent share in GDP (1999–2000) is not sustainable. However, the current approach to urban residential planning that merely carves out areas required for high, middle and low income as well as economically weaker sections that leaves out perhaps more than 50 per cent of people living in urban areas must drastically change. At present, this segment of the city population occupies areas with very poor basic services.

Striking disparities characterise the population growth of cities in industrialised countries. Some cities suffer from ongoing population decline, whereas other cities have experienced increasing numbers of inhabitants in recent years. Whether labour market conditions or amenities via their impact on migration primarily account for differences in cities’ demographic development is an important issue. This paper investigates the determinants of the migration balance of German cities between 2000 and 2007. The focus is on the mobility of workers because labour migration in particular affects the future prospects of cities. The findings suggest that not only labour market conditions but also amenities have an impact on the net migration rate. Moreover, large cities seem to be, ceteris paribus, more attractive than small cities. This finding possibly points to the importance of amenities such as cultural infrastructure and matching externalities in urban (labour) markets that are linked to city size. Urban policy aimed at enhancing the attractiveness of cities should thus consider both boosting the local economy and improving the quality of life.

Higher nominal wages in urban areas are well-documented phenomena which imply higher productivity of urban workers. Yankow and Wheeler show that these gains come through a variety of sources including static agglomeration economies and dynamic learning and matching efficiencies in cities. Yet, earlier articles offer little evidence of how the effects of learning and matching on urban wage differentials vary by city size. This article allows for the relative importance of these productivity advantages to differ according to the size of the city and finds significant differences between small, medium, and large cities. We find that learning efficiencies are most important in medium-sized cities, while a mix of learning and matching efficiencies are important in the largest and smallest cities.

This paper assesses the residential segregation of German immigrants from Turkey, Italy, the Balkans and eastern Europe with a special focus on the link between social and ethnic segregation. Microdata from the German Socioeconomic Panel Study (SOEP) are used. A new dataset provided by the microm Micromarketing-Systeme und Consult GmbH makes accessible information on participants’ immediate residential environments at the micro-neighbourhood level where an average neighbourhood contains only eight households. Substantial levels of residential isolation in the form of own-group overexposure are found for all four migrant groups. Based on previous research, an enhanced methodology is proposed to measure the effect of socioeconomic neighbourhood sorting on ethnic residential segregation. It is shown that differences in income, education, language skills and village/city size have the potential to account for 29–84 per cent of the residential isolation of the four migrant groups.

This article investigates predictors of living wage ordinance adoption in U.S. cities. The authors build on previous research by including all cities with more than 25,000 people (1,072 cities), adding new variables to measure favorable political context, use of event history analysis (Cox regression) to analyze temporal effects in diffusion, and distinguishing between predictors of early and late adoption. General political context, city size, and municipal expenditures were significant predictors, while grievances, presence of a local ACORN chapter, union density, and form of city government were not significant. Density of nonlabor progressive associations and history of progressive activism were major predictors of policy adoption.

The literature on the relationship between city size and urban wages argues that productivity and wages are higher in larger cities. Indeed, a doubling of city size is associated with a 4—8 per cent increase in wages. The human capital externalities literature finds evidence of higher wages in cities with an abundant supply of human capital where knowledge spillovers are plentiful. Interestingly, cities with a large supply of human capital are not themselves large. They have a population of fewer than 1.5 million inhabitants. In view of this evidence, this paper questions whether city size has lost its importance as a determinant of high wages. In other words, is city size necessary to explain wage variations, after controlling for knowledge spillovers? Using a large sample from the 5 per cent PUMS of the 2000 US Census, this paper presents econometric evidence for city size and learning spillover effects on productivity. According to the estimates presented, every additional 100 000 inhabitants in the local labour market raises individual hourly wages by 0.12 per cent. Moreover, a doubling of the human capital density in a metropolitan area results in approximately a 2 per cent increase in average individual hourly wages.

Rank—size distribution has been an important tool in characterising and analysing city size distributions across spatial and temporal scales. Zipf’s law in city rank—size distribution has been observed in many analyses and is considered an important empirical regularity describing the organisation of cities. Based on analyses of the evolution of cities in Texas from 1850 to 2000, this paper documents spatial and temporal autocorrelation in city population growth rates. A modelling strategy has been developed that accounts for the spatial and temporal autocorrelated growth in Texas cities and is effective in reconstructing the empirical rank—size distribution. This study shows that it is necessary to take into account the interdependence among cities in simulating the city size distribution.

This paper examines the evolution of the size distribution of Chinese cities. Since the relaxation of restrictions on rural—urban migration in the 1980s, China has experienced rapid urban growth. However, cities of different sizes have experienced varying patterns of growth. First, the evolution of city size distribution in China is described by documenting the growth in city size and in the number of existing cities. Then, focusing on the period from 1990 to 2000, the urban evolutionary trend is analysed by means of the Pareto law estimation and the mobility of cities between different size groups is examined with the Markov transition matrix. The convergence hypothesis in the city population growth process is also tested. The results suggest that, contrary to the expected dominance of large city growth, the Chinese city size distribution evened out during the 1990s, with small cities growing more rapidly than large cities.

Cities are complex, self-organising, evolving systems and the emergent patterns they manifest provide insight into the dynamic processes in urban systems. This article analyses city size distributions, by decade, from the south-eastern region of the US for the years 1860—1990. It determines if the distributions are clustered into size classes and documents changes in the pattern of size classes over time. A statistical hypothesis test was also performed to detect dependence between city size and growth using discrete probability calculations under the assumption of Gibrat's law. The city size distributions for the south-eastern region of the US were discontinuous, with cities clustering into distinct size classes. The analysis also identified departures from Gibrat's law, indicating variable growth rates at different scales.

This paper measures optimal city sizes for Japanese metropolitan areas, using a surplus function approach. The surplus function is defined as the difference between the total disposable income and the total expenditure of the households working and living in the metropolitan areas and the optimal city size refers to such a population of metropolitan areas that maximises the surplus function. The estimated results show that the optimal city size of Japanese metropolitan areas in the year 2000 was a population of about 18 million, which means that the Tokyo metropolitan area, with nearly 32 million inhabitants, is obviously too large.

The extent of the city is important in a number of respects, not least in relation to the question of city size, an issue of considerable significance in urban and regional analysis. Four definitions of the city are considered here. The first involves the city as a physical entity, or the area devoted to primarily urban uses. This Built City (BC) is perhaps the most familiar perception of the city, largely because it is relatively easy to visualise. The BC forms the core or basis of each of the other three definitions of the city. These are as follows: the Consumption City (an area within which most of the consumption of goods and services occurs in the BC); the Employment City (an area in which the bulk of the employed workforce works in the BC); and the Workforce City (an area upon which the BC draws for a given majority of its labour requirements). These four definitions of the city are brought together and shown to be interrelated.

Complex systems, such as urban systems, emerge unpredictably without the influence of central control as a result of adaptive behaviour by their component, interacting agents. This paper analyses city size distributions, by decade, from the south-western region of the United States for the years 1890-1990. It determines if the distributions were clustered and documents changes in the pattern of clusters over time. Clusters were determined utilising a kernel density estimator and cluster analysis. The data were clustered as determined by both methods. The analyses identified 4-7 clusters of cities in each of the decades analysed. Cities cluster into size classes, suggesting variability in growth rates at different scales.

This article assembles archaeological and documentary evidence on the sizes of cities in Mesoamerica on the eve of Spanish conquest. Out of several hundred documented Late Postclassic urban centers, eighty-seven have reliable archaeological data on the area of the total city and/or the area of the central administrative zone (called the epicenter). The median urban area is 90 hectares (ha), and the median epicenter is 2.0 ha. These data are analyzed in terms of geographical zone, political type, population size and density, and rank-size distributions. The results suggest that political and administrative factors were the primary determinants of city size, with geographical zone having only a minor influence.

How will advances in telecommunications technology affect urban development? In this paper, we develop a general model where individuals involved in relationships use two modes of interaction, face-to-face and electronic communication. Each individual chooses the amount of interaction of each type to maximise her net pay-off from the relationships. Improvements in telecommunications technology may increase or decrease the demand for face-to-face interactions, depending on whether the cross-price elasticity of demand between face-to-face interactions and telecommunications is positive or negative. Embedding the model within a simple spatial framework shows that city size increases with electronic communications if the cross-elasticity is negative. The model presented here is closely related to that of Gaspar and Glaeser, and its conclusions are virtually identical, but they are derived from a simpler and arguably more descriptively accurate representation of the interdependence between face-to-face interactions and electronic communications.

The paper builds on the results of Clark and Stabler who associated Gibrat's law on the independence of growth rate and city size with unit root tests. The paper proposes a direct test of the unit root hypothesis for firm size based on recently developed panel data unit root tests. The results for a sample of Brazilian cities over the period 1980-2000 favour Gibrat's law. Moreover, the results are robust when one considers sub-samples defined for different population sizes and age of municipality.

This paper analyses the effects of the change in the US sales tax on economic activity and city size using a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. Previous works have been designed to isolate the effects of a sales tax change on the particular parameters, such as city size, non-central retail activity and the value of housing. This research summarises the effects of a change in the sales tax rate on all the relevant variables in the context of one model. The underlined theoretical foundation is tested using data collected for the city of Fort Collins, a jurisdiction of approximately 100 000 people in northern Colorado, USA.

This essay commends Chapple, Markusen, Schrock, Yamamoto, and Yu, whose article appears in this issue, for creating an index of metropolitan development potential that captures advantages related to city size and diversification over industries. Their critique of prior ranking studies, however, is unnecessarily harsh. In particular, studies that explore New Economy attributes or the presence of foundational technologies like computers and biotechnology may be valid when judged on their own terms. The authors imply that other analysts’ criteria for selecting high-technology regions are narrower than their own—typically ignoring the human capital dimension—but that is simply not the case. Index and ranking studies of metropolitan areas can provide useful insights provided that their purposes, conceptual frameworks, and methodologies are clearly understood.

China has been experiencing rapid urbanisation since the economic reform starting in 1978. The number of cities increased from 191 in 1978 to 667 in 1999, while the urban share of the national population increased from 18 to 31 per cent. This paper examines China's urbanisation and the evolution of its city system. It uses city-level data from 1991 and 1998 to investigate China's city size distribution and its changes. It also discusses how economic and institutional factors affect the urban system and the patterns of urban growth.

In this empirical study, we test the relationship of Chinese urban productivity and city size. Using over 119 790 firm-level production data cross 28 industries from the Third National Industrial Survey, along with the urban population data of 224 cities, we find strong and prevailing significant agglomeration economies in Chinese urban areas. The estimated average agglomeration elasticity is around 0.051, implying that every doubling of city size will provide a 3.6 per cent gain in firm productivity. The breakdown analysis suggests that, based on current data, the major source of the agglomeration advantage comes from localisation economies-benefits from the concentration of firms of the same industry within one geographical area-rather than urbanisation economies-externalities from urban development itself. The maximum size study also suggests that, while most Chinese cities have yet to grow to demonstrate the full strength of agglomeration economies, many Chinese industries have reached the 'optimal' industry size within a 'given' urban area.

Financial services industries have been an important source of central-city employment, including new jobs. Although decentralization occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, widespread national growth in the sector generally resulted in central-city employment gains. In the 1990s, despite continuing national growth in the sector overall, financial services became a key source of job losses in many cities. From 1991 to 1996, financial services employment declined by 5% in a sample of 40 large cities but increased by 9% in corresponding suburbs. Twenty-five of these cities lost finance jobs, with losses exceeding 10% in 11 cities. Moreover, financial services were often a disproportionate contributor to total employment losses. This article describes these trends and explores the relationship between industrial structure, city size, and region on the suburbanization of financial services employment.

Previous research on variations in mobility rates across metropolitan areas, documented the link between immigration and local mobility, and the way in which local mobility creates 'hot' and 'cold' housing markets. The research in this paper confirms and extends those analyses by examining the interplay between the relocation process and the structure of metropolitan housing markets. The results show that more than three-quarters of the turnover is generated by renters and most of this by households under 35 years of age. It also shows that variations in mobility rates can be predicted by variations in new construction, though it is clear that ultimately it is the underlying population growth which is the critical variable. House prices also vary across metropolitan areas and are influenced by city size, but the major determinants of variation in house prices are household income (a measure of upward pressure on prices) and the tenure structure of the local market. The results show that turnover per se is at least as important as price in creating opportunities for tenure change and residential relocation.

Black mayoral fortunes across America’s big cities improved dramatically in the 1990s. There is speculation on how to explain this shift—whether the factors known to affect black mayoral success have seen wholesale changes or whether this shift derived from marginal changes occurring within these known factors. The author examines pooled cross-sectional data. Black mayoral service was positively associated with black composition in the electorate, city size, and white education; black service was negatively associated with southern location. Marginal changes in factors known to affect black mayoral service accounted for big-city black mayoral success in the early 1990s.

This paper investigates the effect of city size on income inequality in Germany after reunification. Using the Gini index, income inequality is computed. No correlation between income inequality and city size can be found, but dividing Germany in East and West Germany gives further insight into the dependence. It can be seen that a positive connection between city size and income inequality exists in West Germany, while in East Germany no correlation can be found. Another interesting point is the development of income in East German cities. It is shown in this paper that incomes increase rapidly in all cities while the increase in inequality is astonishingly small.

In this paper, we combine the Harris-Todaro wage differential and unemployment with product variety. We analyse how city size is determined and how it relates to unemployment. Our main conclusion is as follows. If the government or the city authority executes the policy leading to growth in the urban population, then the unemployment rate decreases. Furthermore, in this case, even the number of the unemployed can decrease, although the city size increases.

City-size distribution provides a tool for an overall inspection of the trends of population concentration or dispersion throughout systems of cities. Changes in city-size distribution have been related to economic development. In this respect, Israel has been identified as an anomalous country wherein population dispersal has supposedly started at a relatively low stage of economic development. This study re-examines city-size distribution in Israel in selected years between 1948 and 1995, using expanded rank-size distribution functions. Unlike most previous studies, this analysis is carried out using populations of metropolitan areas. Utilising this definition, it has been found that population continued to concentrate at least to the end of the 1980s and at a much higher economic level than anticipated by previous studies. There are indications that distribution of population in the urban system of Israel remained more or less stable during the last five decades.

This paper examines differences in perceptions about the work of mixed tribunals with respect to city size. Mixed tribunals are decision-making bodies in which professional and lay judges jointly decide criminal cases. Detailed questionnaires were distributed to 56 professional judges, 175 lay judges, 40 state attorneys, and 102 attorneys in two different regions of Croatia in 1993. Because the respondents' role in the criminal justice system and legal education (or lack thereof) were related to the selection of the answers, the data were separately analyzed with respect to the size of the city for each category of respondents. Some differences were found in perceptions of the work of the tribunals (e.g., the reported frequency of reading the case file) and in general opinions about mixed tribunals. No differences were found, for example, in the reported frequency of lay judges' questions or comments during proceedings.

Servicing new residential areas has been a major problem in the context of rapid urban expansion. While public expenditure has traditionally played a major role in infrastructure financing, finding and establishing new methods of financing have recently been an important issue. Iran has found the user-pays system to be an efficient financing method. The first part of this paper analyses the nature, significance and process of urban infrastructure provision. The second part looks at the new policy of urban land development in Iran during 1985-90. It goes on to examine the effectiveness of the user-pays system in Iran and the impacts of various factors on the system such as city size and the scales of projects.

This paper analyses the relationship between manufacturing productivity and city size, based on Canadian data for 1975 and 1985. The results differ in some respects from those of US studies; in particular, in Canada city size appears to have a weaker impact on manufacturing productivity, and an impact which is diminishing over time. These findings may be a consequence of several differences in the characteristics of Canadian and US firms, as well as differences between the two urban systems; urbanisation economies in Canada may also have been weakened by regional development policies. There are, at the same time, some striking similarities in the industries which show positive urbanisation economies in the US and Canada. There is also a tendency in Canada for both industries with smaller firms and industries with higher rates of domestic ownership to exhibit greater urbanisation economies.

This study using diffusion of innovation theory examines the influence of perceived characteristics of innovation, individual characteristics, and organizational characteristics on retailers' technology innovativeness. Apparel and gift retailers from five western states (N = 804) were classified into five adopter categories: Innovators (6%), Early Adopters (8.1%), Early Majority (20.6%), Late Majority (41%), and Laggards/Non-Adopters (28.2%). Multivariate and univariate analysis of variance with Tukey's HSD test revealed that these five groups differed overall on perceived characteristics of innovation (relative advantage, compatibility, and observability), individual characteristics (information-seeking, age, education, formal computer training, gender, retail experience in years, seminar attendance, perceived profitability), and organizational characteristics (store sales volume, city size, business competitiveness, and store's actual profitability). Discussion about the differences among the groups is presented along with theoretical, managerial, and educational implications.

The theoretical explanation for the industrial diversification-city size relationship is studied. As an explanation on the basis of variation in factor prices is not adequate, attention is paid to the theory of agglomeration economies, which offers a framework for a consistent theoretical explanation of the industrial diversification-city size and the industrial share-city size relationships. The results of some empirical research into the agglomeration economies-city size relationship are reviewed. Two econometric models are formulated of the industrial diversification-city size and the industrial share-city size relationships in Yugoslavia. The estimation of these models (based on 1981 data) gives evidence to support the hypothesis that there is a statistically significant relationship between city size and industrial diversification/share.

In this paper, the effect of interurban transport costs, incorporating agglomeration economies, on the formation of city structure is examined. It is shown that the city type and the city size will be determined by the effects of interurban transport costs of goods and the advantage (or disadvantage) of agglomeration economies depending on which effect is dominant. It is also shown that the trade patterns in the same type of city will be decided by the interurban transport costs and the transport costs from the world market.

This study examines whether self-monitoring—a ubiquitous social psychological construct that captures the extent to which individuals regulate their self-presentation to match the expectation of others—varies across demographic and social contexts. Building on Erving Goffman’s classic insights on stigma management, the authors expect that the propensity for self-monitoring will be greater among sexual minorities, especially in areas where the stigma surrounding minority sexual orientations is strong. The authors’ survey of U.S. adults shows that sexual minorities report significantly higher levels of self-monitoring than heterosexuals and that this difference disappears in large cities. These findings speak to sociological research on self-presentation, with implications for the literatures on identity formation, stigma management, and labor markets.

Semantic associates of the concept of "urban tempo" were examined through the use of multidimensional scaling and hierarchical clustering techniques. Results revealed a diverse set of categories that were associated with fast-and slow-paced environments. Subjects' ratings of 25 cities on these categories revealed substantial correlations between tempo categories and city size. Multidimensional scaling analysis indicated that three general dimensions underlie tempo categories: (1) arousal-activity, (2) affect-evaluation, and (3) overhead, or cost of living. The data suggest that "tempo" and "pace" are terms that are used as metaphors to describe experiences produced by both temporal and nontemporal attributes of urban environments.