Abstract
We investigated the socioeconomic scaling behavior of all cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants in the Netherlands and found significant superlinear scaling of the gross urban product with population size. Of these cities, 22 major cities have urban agglomerations and urban areas defined by the Netherlands Central Bureau of Statistics. For these major cities we investigated the superlinear scaling for three separate modalities: the cities defined as municipalities, their urban agglomerations and their urban areas. We find superlinearity with power-law exponents of around 1.15. But remarkably, both types of agglomerations underperform if we compare for the same size of population an agglomeration with a city as a municipality. In other words, an urban system as one formal municipality performs better as compared to an urban agglomeration with the same population size. This effect is larger for the second type of agglomerations, the urban areas. We think this finding has important implications for urban policy, in particular municipal reorganizations. A residual analysis suggests that cities with a municipal reorganization recently and in the past decades have a higher probability to perform better than cities without municipal restructuring.
Highlights
Introduction and Political ContextIn recent years there is a rapidly growing interest in the role of cities in our global society
All cities in the Netherlands with more than 50,000 inhabitants, in total 69 cities; the range of population is 50,000 to the largest city with 800,000 inhabitants (Amsterdam). We refer to this set of cities as Set 1. These ‘50,000+’ cities include different types of cities: larger central cities, i.e., major cities that are the centers in a major urban area; smaller central cities in a more countryside-type region; and cities that are suburbs of larger cities
We focus in this paper on the gross urban project (GUP) because the number of jobs correlates strongly with the gross urban product (GUP)
Summary
Introduction and Political ContextIn recent years there is a rapidly growing interest in the role of cities in our global society. Population size is an important determinant of the intensity of many socioeconomic [2, 3, 4, 5], infrastructural and knowledge production activities [6, 7, 8] in cities. Indicators representing these activities appear to scale nonlinearly with the number of inhabitants of cities and urban agglomerations. The density of the population–which determines the average distance of interaction- is discussed as an important variable in explaining superlinear scaling [12] This discussion relates to the problem of the relevant spatial unit of analysis in complex systems. In recent work urban scaling laws are questioned by defining cities based on a population-density and commuting-to- work driven
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