"Increasing returns to scale in the towns of early Tudor England", by Cesaretti et al. (2020) (original) (raw)

Population-Area Relationship for Medieval European Cities (2016; Cesaretti et al)

Medieval European urbanization presents a line of continuity between earlier cities and modern European urban systems. Yet, many of the spatial, political and economic features of medieval European cities were particular to the Middle Ages, and subsequently changed over the Early Modern Period and Industrial Revolution. There is a long tradition of demographic studies estimating the population sizes of medieval European cities, and comparative analyses of these data have shed much light on the long-term evolution of urban systems. However, the next step—to systematically relate the population size of these cities to their spatial and socioeconomic characteristics—has seldom been taken. This raises a series of interesting questions, as both modern and ancient cities have been observed to obey area-population relationships predicted by settlement scaling theory. To address these questions, we analyze a new dataset for the settled area and population of 173 Euro-pean cities from the early fourteenth century to determine the relationship between population and settled area. To interpret this data, we develop two related models that lead to differing predictions regarding the quantitative form of the population-area relationship, depending on the level of social mixing present in these cities. Our empirical estimates of model parameters show a strong densification of cities with city population size, consistent with patterns in contemporary cities. Although social life in medieval Europe was orchestrated by hierarchical institutions (e.g., guilds, church, municipal organizations), our results show no statistically significant influence of these institutions on agglomeration effects. The similarities between the empirical patterns of settlement relating area to population observed here support the hypothesis that cities throughout history share common principles of organization that self-consistently relate their socioeconomic networks to structured urban spaces.

Population-Area Relationship for Medieval European Cities

Can Kings Create Towns that Thrive? The long-run implications of new town foundations

Town foundations have been at the core of urban planning since the onset of civilization. This paper describes the long-run impact of an urbanization place-based policy that was considered a failure by contemporary policy-makers. We test the impact of founded towns using a series of town foundations that took place between 1570 and 1810, when the Swedish Crown conferred monopoly market rights to trade upon 31 previously rural ordinary parishes. We show that towns were founded in locations with little natural potential, evident in their limited impact on agricultural surplus in the surrounding hinterlands. However, the new foundations drove extensive growth in terms of population and created positive spillover effects up to 40-50 km around the settlements. Still, the founded towns remained extraordinarily small by the end of the policy period. It was not until the Industrial Revolution that these towns began to thrive. We suggest that trading rights and sunk investments initially served to coordinate expectations about future growth. Once the towns started to grow, agglomeration effects generated persistence in the long term.

Urban Population in Late Medieval England: The Evidence of the Lay Subsidies

Economic History Review, 2010

The taxation returns of 1377 and 1524 have previously been cited to show that towns made up a growing proportion of England's population in the later middle ages or, alternatively, that this proportion was stable or even declined. Such calculations have often relied on debatable estimates of national population and on controversial multipliers with which to turn numbers of taxpayers into town populations. This paper used a more straightforward approach and calculates the number of taxpayers in 100 English provincial towns for which we have evidence in 1377 and 1524 as a proportion of the number of taxpayers for all of the communities for which we have figures at both of these dates. It concludes that there was a slight decline in the proportion of people living in England's provincial towns, that smaller towns fared better than large ones and that the growth of London was partly at the expense of other towns.

The Rise & Fall of Urban Concentration in Britain: Zipf, Gibrat and Gini Across Two Centuries

Annals of Regional Science, 2024

City size and growth are the subject of a substantial literature in economic geography and urban economics, but consensus remains elusive on the extent to which key regularities such as Zipf’s Law or Gibrat’s Law holds across space and time. We contribute to this literature by examining city size, rank and growth in Britain 1801–2011, the first country in the world to urbanize. Across Zipf, Gibrat and Gini analyses, we find that urban concentration in Britain peaked in the mid-nineteenth century before falling 1861–1911 and again 1951–1991. The evolving relationship between city size, rank and growth in Britain since 1801 strongly suggests that drivers mentioned in the literature, such as random growth, increasing returns to scale and the importance of location fundamentals, are not constant over time. There is some evidence of increasing returns to scale 1801–1861, then offset by factors favouring smaller cities, possibly related to new transport technologies. Further, we show that conclusions about both Zipf’s and Gibrat’s Law would change if weaker city definitions, sample cutoffs and regression methods were used, a likely factor in understanding the often contradictory results in the literature on city dynamics.

"Increasing returns to scale in the towns of early Tudor England", by Cesaretti et al. (2020) (original) (raw)

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