Urban Scaling in Europe

TL;DR

This study investigates whether urban scaling laws apply to European cities, demonstrating that with proper data pooling, clear scaling relations emerge, contrasting with city size distribution laws, and exploring future urban growth scenarios.

Contribution

The paper introduces a method to pool European city data for identifying urban scaling relations, showing their applicability across diverse European urban systems.

Findings

Urban scaling relations are evident when data from multiple European countries are pooled.

Zipf's law poorly describes European city size distributions.

Future European megacities could significantly impact regional inequalities.

Abstract

Over the last decades, in disciplines as diverse as economics, geography, and complex systems, a perspective has arisen proposing that many properties of cities are quantitatively predictable due to agglomeration or scaling effects. Using new harmonized definitions for functional urban areas, we examine to what extent these ideas apply to European cities. We show that while most large urban systems in Western Europe (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK) approximately agree with theoretical expectations, the small number of cities in each nation and their natural variability preclude drawing strong conclusions. We demonstrate how this problem can be overcome so that cities from different urban systems can be pooled together to construct larger datasets. This leads to a simple statistical procedure to identify urban scaling relations, which then clearly emerge as a property of European cities. We compare the predictions of urban scaling to Zipf's law for the size distribution of cities and show that while the former holds well the latter is a poor descriptor of European cities. We conclude with scenarios for the size and properties of future pan-European megacities and their implications for the economic productivity, technological sophistication and regional inequalities of an integrated European urban system.