Urban Scaling and Its Relation with Governance Structures and Future Prospects of Cities (original) (raw)
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Urban Scaling and Effects of Municipal Boundaries
2022
Urban scaling, the superlinear increase of social and economic measures with increasing population, is an ubiquitous and well-researched phenomenon. This article is focused on socio-economic performance scaling, which could possibly be driven by increasing returns of the spatial size and density of interaction networks. If this is indeed the case, we should also find that spatial barriers to interaction affect scaling and cause local performance deviations. Possible barring effects of municipal boundaries are particularly interesting from the perspective of urban area governance policy and regional cooperation. To our best knowledge, this is the first study on this politically relevant and strongly disputed subject. We test the hypothesis of possible barring effects of municipal boundaries by correlating municipal boundaries with the structure of commuter networks within a large densely urbanized region, the Randstad in The Netherlands. The measured network impacts of these boundari...
Journal of the Royal Society, Interface / the Royal Society, 2016
Over the last few decades, in disciplines as diverse as economics, geography and complex systems, a perspective has arisen proposing that many properties of cities are quantitatively predictable due to agglomeration or scaling effects. Using new harmonized definitions for functional urban areas, we examine to what extent these ideas apply to European cities. We show that while most large urban systems in Western Europe (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK) approximately agree with theoretical expectations, the small number of cities in each nation and their natural variability preclude drawing strong conclusions. We demonstrate how this problem can be overcome so that cities from different urban systems can be pooled together to construct larger datasets. This leads to a simple statistical procedure to identify urban scaling relations, which then clearly emerge as a property of European cities. We compare the predictions of urban scaling to Zipf's law for the size distribution of ...
2006
In the theoretical debate on metropolitan governance, we are witnessing new discourses beyond the traditional dispute between localists and regionalists. New dichotomies emerge, for example, “jumping of scale” versus “relativation of scales”; “deterritorializiaton” versus “reterritorialization”; “spaces of place” versus “space of flows.” These dichotomies can be interpreted as different proposals and/or diagnoses in respect to the geographic scale and functional scope of emerging institutions of metropolitan governance. The paper aims to trace the empirical question of which direction we are heading by analyzing recent metropolitan governance reforms in six West German metropolitan areas. The findings show that there is a general trend to create soft institutions of governance on a larger scale as a reaction to global competition and continental integration. Beyond this commonality, we discover quite different institutional trajectories. The regions which are strongly embedded in the global economy tend toward a “deterritorialized” form of metropolitan governance with rather weak institutions characterized by large geographic scales and functional specialization. In contrast, the regions which are not as much embedded in the global economy have been able to create strong governance institutions on a regional level characterized by a rather small geographic scope and based on a territorial logic of functional integration and geographic congruence.
Effects of municipal boundaries measured by combining urban scaling and spatial interaction
Journal of The Royal Society Interface
Urban scaling, the superlinear increase of socio-economic measures with increasing population, is a well-researched phenomenon. This article is focused on socio-economic performance scaling, which could possibly be driven by increasing returns of the size and density of interaction networks. If this is indeed the case, we should also find that spatial barriers to interaction affect scaling and cause local performance deviations. Possible barring effects of municipal boundaries are important from the perspective of urban and regional governance. We test the hypothesis of barring effects by correlating municipal boundaries with the structure of commuter networks within a large densely urbanized region, the Randstad in The Netherlands. The measured impacts of these boundaries are correlated with local employment-scaling deviations. Applying spatially weighted modelling techniques, we find that municipal borders have significant effects on inter-municipal commuting and indicate these ef...
The hypothesis of urban scaling: formalization, implications and challenges
There is strong expectation that cities, across time, culture and level of development, share much in common in terms of their form and function. Recently, attempts to formalize mathematically these expectations have led to the hypothesis of urban scaling, namely that certain properties of all cities change, on average, with their size in predictable scale-invariant ways. The emergence of these scaling relations depends on a few general properties of cities as social networks, co-located in space and time, that conceivably apply to a wide range of human settlements. Here, we discuss the present evidence for the hypothesis of urban scaling, some of the methodological issues dealing with proxy measurements and units of analysis and place these findings in the context of other theories of cities and urban systems. We show that a large body of evidence about the scaling properties of cities indicates, in analogy to other complex systems, that they cannot be treated as extensive systems ...