Berlin 2018 – scientific programme

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 64: Traffic Dynamics, Urban and Regional Systems (joint session SOE/DY)

DY 64.2: Talk

Thursday, March 15, 2018, 15:15–15:30, MA 001

Dynamics of cities' population: relating Zipf's law and urban scaling — •José M. Miotto — LIACS, Universiteit Leiden, Netherlands

The distribution of city sizes in a country is characterized by having a power-law tail (Pareto), a common feature of large social systems. Proportional effect -each city grows with the same rate- is a well-accepted growth model for cities that explains the emergence of this feature (Gabaix); however, data from cities gathered in historical scale (Italy, 1861-2011) shows important features that cannot be explained by this model. I will introduce a modified growth model where the growth rate of cities scales with city size, and show that this model can (a) reproduce quantitatively the cities' size distribution evolution in time, (b) provide a better null model for the time evolution of the population of single cities and (c) reveal patterns in the dynamics of internal migration.