Urban Scaling of Cities in the Netherlands

TL;DR

This study analyzes the socioeconomic scaling of Dutch cities, revealing superlinear growth in urban productivity with city size and highlighting the impact of municipal organization on urban performance.

Contribution

It provides new insights into how different definitions of urban areas affect superlinear scaling and the influence of municipal restructuring on city performance.

Findings

Cities exhibit superlinear scaling with an exponent around 1.15.

Urban agglomerations underperform compared to municipalities of the same size.

Municipal reorganizations are associated with improved urban performance.

Abstract

We investigated the socioeconomic scaling behavior of all cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants in the Netherlands and found significant superlinear scaling of gross urban product with population size. Of these cities, 22 major cities have urban agglomerations and urban areas defined by the Netherlands Central Bureau of Statistics. For these major cities we investigated the superlinear scaling for three separate modalities: the cities defined as municipalities, their urban agglomerations and their urban areas. We find superlinearity with power-law exponents of around 1.15. But remarkably, both types of agglomerations underperform if we compare for the same size of population an agglomeration with a city as a municipality. In other words, an urban system as one formal municipality performs better as compared to an urban agglomeration with the same population size. This effect is larger for the second type of agglomerations, the urban areas. We think this finding has important implications for urban policy, in particular municipal reorganizations. A residual analysis suggests that cities with a municipal reorganization recently and in the past decades have a higher probability to perform better than cities without municipal restructuring.