Urban Scaling and Its Relation with Governance Structures and Future Prospects of Cities (original) (raw)

We investigated the socioeconomic urban scaling behavior in three European Union countries: Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands. In the case of Denmark our analysis relates to all 96 municipalities. We investigate the scaling of larger cities, municipalities within the Copenhagen agglomeration, and municipalities in rural areas. We also distinguish between municipalities with high and low centrality. We find superlinear scaling of the gross urban product with population size in all cases, with exponents between 1.14 and 1.23, and for municipalities in rural areas a surprisingly high value of 1.39. In Germany we distinguish between major cities of which the surrounding urban region belongs to the municipality of the city, the ‘Kreisfreie Städte’ (in total 106), and ‘Kreise’, i.e., regions around smaller cities consisting of several municipalities (in total 296). A striking finding is that the scaling exponents differ substantially from one region to another. We find in most cases a...