The Area and Population of Cities: New Insights from a Different Perspective on Cities
利用高分辨率数据从下至上构建城市，发现英国和美国的小城市人口分布也遵循齐普夫定律，并首次发现城市面积也服从该定律。
The distribution of city populations has attracted much attention, in part because it constrains models of local growth. However, there is no consensus on the distribution below the very upper tail, because available data need to rely on “legal” rather than “economic” definitions for medium and small cities. To remedy this difficulty, we construct cities “from the bottom up” by clustering populated areas obtained from high-resolution data. We find that Zipf 's law for population holds for cities as small as 5,000 inhabitants in Great Britain and 12,000 inhabitants in the US. We also find a Zipf 's law for areas.