According Zipf's Law, city sizes follow a Pareto distribution, with the rank (R) of a city i being proportional to its size (S): R(i)=A*S-α or ln(R) = ln(A)-α*ln(S), where α is a slope gradient or Pareto parameter, varying around 1. However, several empirical studies, carried out to...

As we hypothesize, the selection of observation units may become a critical consideration for an empirical investigation of Gibrat’s Law, according to which the growth of cities is expected to be independent of their sizes. In order to verify this hypothesis, we investigate whether the...

Between 1952 and 2001, the number of urban settlements in Nepal grew from 10 to 58, while their share in the country's population increased from 2.6 to 14.4 per cent. However, the spatial distribution of urban growth was uneven. To find out how this unevenness was structured, a GIS-assisted...

Urban location is a multidimensional phenomenon: its dimensions are attributes, natural and man-made, which together affect urban performance. To capture their combined effect, the paper introduces the concept of `location package'—i.e. the set of location-related advantages enjoyed by an...