Urban Scaling in Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands. Relation with Governance Structures

TL;DR

This study analyzes urban socioeconomic scaling in Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands, revealing superlinear relationships between city size and economic output, and highlighting the impact of governance structures on urban growth and efficiency.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of urban scaling laws across three countries and links these patterns to governance structures and socio-economic indicators.

Findings

Superlinear scaling exponents range from 1.14 to 1.33 across regions.

One-governance urban areas outperform multi-governance areas.

Urban scaling relates to generative processes rather than distributive ones.

Abstract

We investigate the socioeconomic urban scaling behavior in Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands. In the case of Denmark we examine the scaling of larger cities, municipalities within the Copenhagen agglomeration, and municipalities in rural areas. We also distinguish between municipalities with high and low centrality. Superlinear scaling of the gross urban product with population size is found in all cases, with exponents between 1.14 and 1.24. In Germany we distinguish between major cities of which the surrounding urban region belongs to the municipality of the city, and regions around smaller cities consisting of several municipalities. We find in most cases a superlinear scaling with exponents up to 1.33. A strong relation is found between the measured residuals of the scaling equations and the socio-economic position of a cities assessed with a set of different indicators. We also investigate the relation between scaling of the regions and centrality, including the Zipf-distribution. We find that urban scaling is related to generative and not to distributive processes. For the Netherlands we focus on the group of the major cities with their agglomerations and on all municipalities in the Province of Zuid-Holland. We examined the scaling of municipalities within larger urban areas in the Netherlands. In all cases significant superlinear scaling is measured with exponents up to 1.28. One-governance urban areas perform better than multi-governance urban areas. This leads to challenging conclusions about the importance of a one-municipality instead of a multi-municipality governance in major urban regions. A coherent governance of major cities and their agglomerations may create more effective social interactions which reinforce economic and cultural activities generating a substantial wealth benefit.