{"database":"biostudies-literature","file_versions":[],"scores":null,"additional":{"omics_type":["Unknown"],"volume":["2(9)"],"submitter":["Decker EH"],"pubmed_abstract":["Urban areas and their voracious appetites are increasingly dominating the flows of energy and materials around the globe. Understanding the size distribution and dynamics of urban areas is vital if we are to manage their growth and mitigate their negative impacts on global ecosystems. For over 50 years, city size distributions have been assumed to universally follow a power function, and many theories have been put forth to explain what has become known as Zipf's law (the instance where the exponent of the power function equals unity). Most previous studies, however, only include the largest cities that comprise the tail of the distribution. Here we show that national, regional and continental city size distributions, whether based on census data or inferred from cluster areas of remotely-"],"journal":["PloS one"],"pagination":["e934"],"full_dataset_link":["https://www.ebi.ac.uk/biostudies/studies/S-EPMC1978523"],"repository":["biostudies-literature"],"pubmed_title":["Global patterns of city size distributions and their fundamental drivers."],"pmcid":["PMC1978523"],"pubmed_authors":["Kerkhoff AJ","Moses ME","Decker EH"],"additional_accession":[]},"is_claimable":false,"name":"Global patterns of city size distributions and their fundamental drivers.","description":"Urban areas and their voracious appetites are increasingly dominating the flows of energy and materials around the globe. Understanding the size distribution and dynamics of urban areas is vital if we are to manage their growth and mitigate their negative impacts on global ecosystems. For over 50 years, city size distributions have been assumed to universally follow a power function, and many theories have been put forth to explain what has become known as Zipf's law (the instance where the exponent of the power function equals unity). Most previous studies, however, only include the largest cities that comprise the tail of the distribution. Here we show that national, regional and continental city size distributions, whether based on census data or inferred from cluster areas of remotely-","dates":{"release":"2007-01-01T00:00:00Z","publication":"2007 Sep","modification":"2025-04-21T23:42:33.301Z","creation":"2019-03-26T23:01:18Z"},"accession":"S-EPMC1978523","cross_references":{"pubmed":["17895975"],"doi":["10.1371/journal.pone.0000934"]}}