The unexpected increase in the number of census towns (CTs) in the last census has thrust them into the spotlight. Using a hitherto unexploited dataset, it is found that many of the new CTs satisfied the requisite criteria in 2001 itself; mitigating concerns of inflated urbanisation. The new CTs...

Rural and urban development in sustainable context is a complex process that requires an improvement of the existing situation and a removing of the dysfunctions. Over time, the rural area was not addressed as much as urban area, rural analysis is often fragmentary explained and incomplete...

This paper uses un-truncated city population data from six countries (the United States, Spain, Italy, France, England and Japan) to illustrate how parametric growth regressions can lead to biased results when testing for Gibrat’s law in city size distributions. The OLS results show...

I begin with a rough sketch of the incidence of the cultural economy in US cities today. I then offer a brief review of some theoretical approaches to the question of creativity, with special reference to issues of social and geographic context. The city is a powerful fountainhead of creativity,...

After the intense and unprecedented urbanisation of the last centuries, it is more than evident that a clear understanding of the ongoing trends of urban growth and clustering is needed if we are to aim for a better insight as to their possible future. The main aim of this paper is the...

In this short paper we apply the methodology proposed by Ioannides and Overman (2003) to estimate a local Zipf exponent using data for the entire twentieth century of the complete distribution of cities (incorporated places) without any size restrictions in the US. The results reject Zipf’s...

Three urban growth theories predict parallel growth of cities. The endogenous growth theory predicts deterministic parallel growth; the random growth theory implies that city growth follows Gibrat’s law with a steady-state distribution; and the hybrid growth theory suggests the co-movement 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. On considering the distribution of...

This paper analyses the evolution of the size distribution of cities in the United States throughout the 20th century. In particular, we are interested in testing the fulfilment of two empirical regularities studied in urban economics: Zipf’s law, which postulates that the product between rank...