Multi-scaling mix and non-universality between population and facility density

Abstract

The distribution of facilities is closely related to our social economic activities. Recent studies have reported a scaling relation between population and facility density, with the exponent depending on the type of facility. In this paper, we show that generally this exponent is not universal for a specific type of facility. Instead, by using Chinese data, we find that it increases with per capita gross domestic product (GDP). Thus our observed scaling law is actually a mixture of several multi-scaling relations. This result indicates that facilities may change their public or commercial attributes according to the outside environment. We argue that this phenomenon results from an unbalanced regional economic level, and suggest a modification of a previous model by introducing the consuming capacity. The modified model reproduces most of our observed properties.