IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/jahrfr/v38y2018i2d10.1007_s10037-018-0122-6.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The detection of natural cities in the Netherlands—Nocturnal satellite imagery and Zipf’s law
[Die Abgrenzung natürlicher Städte in den Niederlanden: Nachtsatellitenbilder und das Zipf-Gesetz]

Author

Listed:
  • Rolf Bergs

    (PRAC Bergs & Issa Partnership Co.)

Abstract

How to detect the true extent of cities in highly urbanized countries? This paper addresses the delineation of natural urban and non-urban space and its change based on a wider understanding of spatial heterogeneity. The Netherlands is selected as a case study. “Natural” means the extent of urban space irrespective of administrative boundaries. The database, used for this study, is radiance-calibrated nocturnal satellite imagery from the Defence Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP). Extraction of cities is done by K-means segmentation. Based on the variance of luminosity it is possible to detect natural urban space. After removal of outliers in the skewed pixel distributions and after correction of “blooming” (over-glow of light emission) Zipf’s law is then applied as a test for segmentation adequacy. The comparative analysis for the years 1996 and 2011 shows that the rank-size distribution of natural cities is well confirmed by Zipf’s law, in contrast to that of administrative cities.

Suggested Citation

  • Rolf Bergs, 2018. "The detection of natural cities in the Netherlands—Nocturnal satellite imagery and Zipf’s law [Die Abgrenzung natürlicher Städte in den Niederlanden: Nachtsatellitenbilder und das Zipf-Gesetz]," Review of Regional Research: Jahrbuch für Regionalwissenschaft, Springer;Gesellschaft für Regionalforschung (GfR), vol. 38(2), pages 111-140, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:jahrfr:v:38:y:2018:i:2:d:10.1007_s10037-018-0122-6
    DOI: 10.1007/s10037-018-0122-6
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10037-018-0122-6
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s10037-018-0122-6?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Kristian Giesen & Jens Südekum, 2011. "Zipf's law for cities in the regions and the country," Journal of Economic Geography, Oxford University Press, vol. 11(4), pages 667-686, July.
    2. Jan Eeckhout, 2004. "Gibrat's Law for (All) Cities," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 94(5), pages 1429-1451, December.
    3. Gilles Duranton, 2007. "Urban Evolutions: The Fast, the Slow, and the Still," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 97(1), pages 197-221, March.
    4. Xavier Gabaix & Rustam Ibragimov, 2011. "Rank - 1 / 2: A Simple Way to Improve the OLS Estimation of Tail Exponents," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 29(1), pages 24-39, January.
    5. Starrett, David, 1978. "Market allocations of location choice in a model with free mobility," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 17(1), pages 21-37, February.
    6. Charlotta Mellander & José Lobo & Kevin Stolarick & Zara Matheson, 2015. "Night-Time Light Data: A Good Proxy Measure for Economic Activity?," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(10), pages 1-18, October.
    7. Rosen, Kenneth T. & Resnick, Mitchel, 1980. "The size distribution of cities: An examination of the Pareto law and primacy," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 8(2), pages 165-186, September.
    8. Vernon Henderson & Adam Storeygard & David N. Weil, 2011. "A Bright Idea for Measuring Economic Growth," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(3), pages 194-199, May.
    9. Tialda Haartsen & Paulus P.P. Huigen & Peter Groote, 2003. "Rural Areas in the Netherlands," Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG, vol. 94(1), pages 129-136, February.
    10. Xavier Gabaix, 2016. "Power Laws in Economics: An Introduction," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 30(1), pages 185-206, Winter.
    11. Brakman,Steven & Garretsen,Harry & van Marrewijk,Charles, 2009. "The New Introduction to Geographical Economics," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521698030, December.
    12. Xavier Gabaix, 1999. "Zipf's Law for Cities: An Explanation," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 114(3), pages 739-767.
    13. Xavier Gabaix, 1999. "Zipf's Law and the Growth of Cities," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 89(2), pages 129-132, May.
    14. Paul Krugman, 1997. "Development, Geography, and Economic Theory," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 026261135x, December.
    15. Henri L.F. de Groot & Gerard Marlet & Coen Teulings & Wouter Vermeulen, 2015. "Cities and the Urban Land Premium," Books, Edward Elgar Publishing, number 16515.
    16. Soo, Kwok Tong, 2005. "Zipf's Law for cities: a cross-country investigation," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 35(3), pages 239-263, May.
    17. Peter H. Egger & Gabriel Loumeau & Nicole Püschel, 2017. "Natural City Growth in the People's Republic of China," Asian Development Review, MIT Press, vol. 34(2), pages 51-85, September.
    18. Gabaix, Xavier & Ibragimov, Rustam, 2011. "Rank − 1 / 2: A Simple Way to Improve the OLS Estimation of Tail Exponents," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 29(1), pages 24-39.
    19. Gan, Li & Li, Dong & Song, Shunfeng, 2006. "Is the Zipf law spurious in explaining city-size distributions?," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 92(2), pages 256-262, August.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Sun, Xiangdong & Yuan, Ouyang & Xu, Zhao & Yin, Yanhui & Liu, Qian & Wu, Ling, 2021. "Did Zipf's Law hold for Chinese cities and why? Evidence from multi-source data," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 106(C).
    2. Rolf Bergs, 2021. "Spatial dependence in the rank-size distribution of cities – weak but not negligible," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 16(2), pages 1-16, February.
    3. Rolf Bergs & Rüdiger Budde, 2022. "The potential of small-scale spatial data in regional science," Review of Regional Research: Jahrbuch für Regionalwissenschaft, Springer;Gesellschaft für Regionalforschung (GfR), vol. 42(2), pages 97-110, August.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Valente J. Matlaba & Mark J. Holmes & Philip McCann & Jacques Poot, 2013. "A Century Of The Evolution Of The Urban System In Brazil," Review of Urban & Regional Development Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 25(3), pages 129-151, November.
    2. Duranton, Gilles & Puga, Diego, 2014. "The Growth of Cities," Handbook of Economic Growth, in: Philippe Aghion & Steven Durlauf (ed.), Handbook of Economic Growth, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 5, pages 781-853, Elsevier.
    3. Rafael González‐Val, 2019. "Historical urban growth in Europe (1300–1800)," Papers in Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 98(2), pages 1115-1136, April.
    4. Rafael González-Val, 2019. "US city-size distribution and space," Spatial Economic Analysis, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 14(3), pages 283-300, July.
    5. Arshad, Sidra & Hu, Shougeng & Ashraf, Badar Nadeem, 2019. "Zipf’s law, the coherence of the urban system and city size distribution: Evidence from Pakistan," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 513(C), pages 87-103.
    6. M. Modica & A. Reggiani & P. Nijkamp, 2015. "A Comparative Analysis of Gibrat s and Zipf s Law on Urban Population," Working Papers wp1008, Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna.
    7. Christian Düben & Melanie Krause, 2021. "Population, light, and the size distribution of cities," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 61(1), pages 189-211, January.
    8. Giorgio Fazio & Marco Modica, 2015. "Pareto Or Log-Normal? Best Fit And Truncation In The Distribution Of All Cities," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 55(5), pages 736-756, November.
    9. Pérez Valbuena, Gerson Javier & Meisel Roca, Adolfo, 2014. "Ley De Zipf Y De Gibrat Para Colombia Y Sus Regiones: 1835-2005," Revista de Historia Económica / Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 32(2), pages 247-286, September.
    10. Bluhm, Richard & Krause, Melanie, 2022. "Top lights: Bright cities and their contribution to economic development," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 157(C).
    11. Marco Modica, 2014. "Does the EU have homogeneous urban structure area? The role of agglomeration and the impact of shocks on urban structure," ERSA conference papers ersa14p229, European Regional Science Association.
    12. Rafael GONZÀLEZ-VAL, 2012. "Zipf’S Law: Main Issues In Empirical Work," Region et Developpement, Region et Developpement, LEAD, Universite du Sud - Toulon Var, vol. 36, pages 147-164.
    13. Kristian GIESEN & Jens SÜDEKUM, 2012. "The French Overall City Size Distribution," Region et Developpement, Region et Developpement, LEAD, Universite du Sud - Toulon Var, vol. 36, pages 107-126.
    14. Sebastien TERRA, 2009. "Zipf's Law for Cities: On a New Testing Procedure," Working Papers 200920, CERDI.
    15. Ronan Lyons & Elisa Maria Tirindelli, 2022. "The Rise & Fall of Urban Concentration in Britain: Zipf, Gibrat and Gini across two centuries," Trinity Economics Papers tep0522, Trinity College Dublin, Department of Economics.
    16. Esteban Rossi-Hansberg & Mark L. J. Wright, 2007. "Urban Structure and Growth," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 74(2), pages 597-624.
    17. Hasan Engin Duran & Andrzej Cieślik, 2021. "The distribution of city sizes in Turkey: A failure of Zipf’s law due to concavity," Regional Science Policy & Practice, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 13(5), pages 1702-1719, October.
    18. Hernán D. Rozenfeld & Diego Rybski & Xavier Gabaix & Hernán A. Makse, 2011. "The Area and Population of Cities: New Insights from a Different Perspective on Cities," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(5), pages 2205-2225, August.
    19. Chauvin, Juan Pablo & Glaeser, Edward & Ma, Yueran & Tobio, Kristina, 2017. "What is different about urbanization in rich and poor countries? Cities in Brazil, China, India and the United States," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 98(C), pages 17-49.
    20. Tomoya Mori & Tony E. Smith, 2009. "A Reconsideration of the NAS Rule from an Industrial Agglomeration Perspective," KIER Working Papers 669, Kyoto University, Institute of Economic Research.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:jahrfr:v:38:y:2018:i:2:d:10.1007_s10037-018-0122-6. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.