Empirical Investigation of City Size Distribution in Iran

Abstract

This study investigates the evidence on the city-size distribution in Iranian urban system. The aim of this paper is to undertake the empirical testing of Zipf and Gibrat’s law based on the national population in 2006, 2011 and 2016, considering 337 cities, which range from 20,010 to 8,737,510 inhabitants. The findings show that the process of city growth in Iran is not follows by Zipf’s law and confirm the uneven city growth dynamism and heterogeneous distribution of population in urban structure of Iran. The main reason behind that is the fact that the Capital of Iran, Tehran, exercise a primate city with extreme population concentration in comparison to other urban structure elements due to gigantic economic activity compared to other areas and centralized administrations that serves beyond their national boundaries.