India is at the cusp of a major urban transition. In less than twenty years, India's urban population is expected to nearly double from 377 million today to over 600 million. Indian cities already contribute an estimated two-thirds of India's GDP, and this number is expected to rise to 75% by...

The Algarve faces unprecedented challenges resulting from increase of urban sprawl and population density along its coastal perimeters. A growing loss of ecosystems and natural landscapes have led to major asymmetries between the interior of the Algarve and the littoral areas. The depletion of...

The aim of this work is to test empirically the validity of Gibrat's Law in the growth of cities, using data for all the twentieth century of the complete distribution of cities (without any size restrictions) in three countries: the US, Spain and Italy. For this we use different techniques...

This paper studies urban growth in Korean cities. First, I document that population growth patterns change over time and that the current population distribution supports random urban growth. I confirm two empirical laws-Zipf's law and Gibrat's law-both of which hold in the period of 1995-2015,...

The commonly-used satellite images of nighttime lights fail to capture the true brightness of most cities. We show that night lights are a reliable proxy for economic activity at the city level, provided they are first corrected for top-coding. We present a stylized model of urban luminosity and...

Beijing has undergone rapid urbanisation from 1950-2010. The main built-up area expanded concentrically from 100 to 1210 km2. Its urban fringe became popular for new developments, some placed haphazardly. The government concentrated efforts in "stopping concentric fringe expansion". E.g. on...