Opinion: Scaling trajectories of cities

Urban scaling research finds that agglomeration effects—the higher-than-expected outputs of larger cities—follow robust “superlinear” scaling relations in cross-sectional data. But the paradigm has predictive ambitions involving the dynamic scaling of individual cities over many time points and expects parallel superlinear growth trajectories as cities’ populations grow. This prediction has not yet been rigorously tested. I use geocoded microdata to approximate the city-size effect on per capita wage in 73 Swedish labor market areas for 1990–2012. The data support a superlinear scaling regime for all Swedish agglomerations. Echoing the rich-get-richer process on the system level, however, trajectories of superlinear growth are highly robust only for cities assuming dominant positions in the urban hierarchy.