Friends -- 
Is our interest in the emergence of cities (as a driver of urban network
growth) orthogonal to our focus on Zipf's law? 
Zipf normalizes his distribution to the largest, not the smallest urban
areas.  Dendrinos reminds us that big cities depend on little cities (a
la Christaller) but not visa-versa. People migrate to big cities because
their average income (economic utility) is higher and less volatile than
in smaller cities. Attached is a ReverseRank graph wherein the smallest
UA city (50,000) is #1.  It seems to suggest a bifurcation at around a
population of 100,000.
Tom


-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Batty [mailto:mbatty@geog.ucl.ac.uk] 
Sent: Saturday, May 03, 2003 7:19 AM
To: nystuen@umich.edu; tom wagner
Cc: Yichun Xie
Subject: RE: observations


I too ma very interested in the emergence of new cities and the
qualitative 
change in what a city is over this period - as you say, John -
ontological 
issues - are cities distinct objects and do they have boundaries and it
so, 
then how do we deal with changing boundaries and also changing
perceptions


Mike




 ReverseZipfRANK.htm