Urban scaling, geography, centrality: Relation with local government structures

Abstract

We investigate socioeconomic urban scaling behavior of municipalities in Denmark, the Netherlands, and in particular in Germany. Our interest is twofold. First we investigate whether, and to what extent, scaling occurs in various types of urban areas. The second important topic of research concerns the comparison of specific types of urban areas with regard to the values of the gross urban product. This is a new approach: two scaling systems are compared not only in terms of the scaling exponent, but also in terms of the differences in the gross urban product. We are specifically interested in the role of urban governance in terms of local urban government structures. Germany is our central case because it works as a natural experiment: a large number of urban areas is one-governance, but others are not. More specifically, we distinguish between cities of which the surrounding urban area belongs to the municipality of the city (kreisfreie cities), and those specific districts (Kreise) which are urban areas consisting of several municipalities. Our findings suggest that urban areas with one municipality perform better than urban areas with fragmented governance structures. We also investigate the relation between scaling of Kreise and simple measures of centrality, including the Zipf-distribution. A strong relation is found between the measured residuals of the scaling equations and the socioeconomic position of cities assessed with a set of different socioeconomic indicators. Given the debate on the effectiveness of municipal reform, our results may lead to challenging conclusions about the importance of one-municipality instead of multi-municipality governance in urban areas. These results are relevant for policy as they suggest that there is a benefit to unifying the governance structure of compact urban agglomerations.

A Framework to Assess the Citation Performance of Complex Innovation Systems

“… Katz (2016b) , Table 6 reports a similar scaling exponent for MAPS. The scaling exponent is also similar to the one found by van Raan (2020) for the scaling of the gross urban product for all (kreisfreize) cities and Kreize in Germany. The parameters of the power-law correlation are useful to prepare scale-independent indicators solving the equation for each field.…”

Spatial structure and productivity in European regions

“…A regional overreliance on the infrastructure and capacity of a single city could lead to disadvantages, such as congestion, pollution, and surging land rents and prices for localized labour (Fujita et al, 1997). However, an important debate focuses on the question of which spatial structures align with better economic performance and scaling in urban regions (Jong, 2021;Pumain & Rozenblat, 2019;Van Raan, 2020). Does critical economic mass imply that only firms and people in larger cities reap economic scale advantages (and profit from agglomeration economies), or can polycentric urban regions, with more complex morphological and functional fragmentation, have similar economic gains (Batty, 2013, pp.…”

German cities with universities: Socioeconomic position and university performance

“…The exponent β follows from the measurement; in most cases, values of the exponent are between 1.10 and 1.20. We refer to our recent work on urban scaling for further details (van Raan, 2020). The urban scaling relation implies that a city twice as large (in population) as another city can be expected to have approximately a 2 1.15 = 2.22 larger socioeconomic performance (in terms of the gross urban product).…”