Mori, Tomoya, Tony E. Smith, and Wen-Tai Hsu. Common power laws for cities and spatial fractal structures. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117.12 (2020)

Objective:

• Develop explicit tests of the common power law using data of city size and road distances for various countries

Case:

• US, France, Germany, Japan, China and India

Methodology:

• Power law
• Least-squares prediction

Data Source

• Population: LandScan
• Road network: OSM

Findings:

• The spacing-out property and spatial CPL proporty is essentially all countries

• The existence of local city systems surrounding the largest cities and thus supports the spatial-grouping property
• City-size distributions in different parts of the hierarchical structure exhibit a high degree of commonality in terms of power laws

Coding Reference:

• Routine engine C++