The morphology of urban agglomerations for developing countries: A case study with China

Abstract

In this article, the relationship between two well-accepted empirical propositions regarding the distribution of population in cities, namely, Gibrat's law and Zipf's law, are rigorously examined using the Chinese census data. Our findings are quite in contrast with the most of the previous studies performed exclusively for developed countries. This motivates us to build a general environment to explain the morphology of urban agglomerations both in developed and developing countries. A dynamic process of job creation generates a particular distribution for the urban agglomerations and introduction of Special Economic Zones (SEZ) in this abstract environment shows that the empirical observations are in good agreement with the proposed model.