A typology of activities over a century of urban growth

TL;DR

This study analyzes a century of urban activity dynamics in Paris using a new geo-historical database, revealing how different activity types scale with population and respond to historical events.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive classification of urban activities based on their growth patterns and sensitivity to historical perturbations over nearly a century.

Findings

Activities for daily needs scale linearly with population.

Public services scale sublinearly with population.

City-specific activities scale superlinearly and are sensitive to historical events.

Abstract

Contemporary literature on the dynamics of economic activities in growing cities mainly focused on a few years or decades time frames. Using a new geo-historical database constructed from historical directories with about 1 million entries, we present a comprehensive analysis of the dynamics of activities in a major city, Paris, over almost a century (1829-1907). Our analysis suggests that activities that accompany city growth can be classified in different categories according to their dynamics and their scaling with population: (i) linear for everyday needs of residents (food stores, clothing retailers, health care practitioners), (ii) sublinear for public services (legal, administrative, educational), (iii) superlinear for the city's specific features (passing fads, specialization, timely needs). The dynamics of these activities is in addition very sensitive to historical perturbations such as large scale public works or political conflicts. These results shed light on the evolution of activities, a crucial component of growing cities.