Rich and Poor Cities in Europe. An Urban Scaling Approach to Mapping the European Economic Transition

Abstract

Recent advances in the urban science make broad use of the notion of scaling. We focus here on the important scaling relationship between the gross metropolitan product (GMP) of a city and its population (pop). It has been demonstrated that GMP ∝ Y Ypopβ with β always greater than 1 and close to 1.2. This fundamental finding highlights a universal rule that holds across countries and cultures and might explain the very nature of cities. However, in an increasingly connected world, the hypothesis that the economy of a city solely depends on its population might be questionable. Using data for 248 cities in the European Union between 2005 and 2010, we found a double GMP/pop scaling regime. For West EU cities, β = 1 over the whole the period, while for post-communist cities β > 1 and increases from ∼1.2 to ∼1.4. The evolution of the scaling exponent describes the convergence of post-communist European cities to open and liberal economies. We propose a simple model of economic convergence in which, under stable political conditions, a linear GMP/pop scaling is expected for all cities. The results suggest that the GMP/pop super-linear scaling represents a phase of economic growth rather than a steady, universal urban feature. The results also suggest that relationships between cities are embedded in their political and economic context and cannot be neglected in explanations of cities, urbanization and urban economics.

Scaling Laws in City Growth: Setting Limitations with Self-Organizing Maps

“…What’s more, scaling relations may not even always apply (see, e.g., budget expenditures on maintenance as shown in the Appendix in S1 File. Applying SOM gives hard evidence confirming findings of Strano and Sood [19]. …”

Cohesion Policy and European identity building: Trust as a mediating element

“…A different result is instead obtained for overall per capita GDP. The last one has a positive relationship with identity only for old Member States, while the same does not apply for the new ones, where the average level of wealth is probably capturing also other regional characteristics, such as urbanization, being income highly polarized in large cities (Strano & Sood, ).…”

Contemporary evolution and scaling of 32 major cities in China

“…Recent studies (Arcaute et al. , Strano and Sood ), however, have shown that the scaling of urban features with city size does not necessarily follow Bettencourt's scheme between the nature of urban properties and the scaling regime.…”