ÉVOLUTION DES HIÉRARCHIES URBAINES ET LOI DE ZIPF : LE CAS DES BALKANS

The main issue in this paper is cities’ size distribution and urban hierarchy. The aim of the paper is to study whether different regions or countries follow Zipf's law in the long term. By applying this analysis on the Balkan Peninsula, a region which has gone through a major political, institutional and demographic upheaval, during the last thirty years, this paper shows that Zipf's law holds whatever the conditions of the evolution of an urban system. Meanwhile, it proposes an analysis on the most recent work in estimating Pareto exponent (the hierarchy coefficient), which is crucial in characterizing the shape of urban hierarchies.