SIZE COLLAPSE OF THE LARGEST CITIES IN CITY SIZE DISTRIBUTION AND THE INFLUENCING FACTORS
Metropolises,especially the largest part of them,play a vital role in the national development.However,in-depth analyses focusing on the relative collapse of the largest cities compared to the overall city size distribution are severely lacking.Based on the population and build-up data of the Global Human Settle-ment Layers from 1975 to 2015 and applying the unified definition of cities,this paper explores the extent,causes and mechanism of the size collapse of the largest cities in more than 100 countries.The results show that the sizes of the largest cities in a third of the countries in the world are collapsed,that is lower than its simulated value based on the overall city size distribution.With the increase of the largest cities'sizes,the ex-tent of col-lapse first deceases and then increases as a result of the dynamic equilibrium between agglomera-tion economy and agglomeration diseconomy.The application of advanced transportation technology can re-duce the size collapse extent of the largest cities.But with the continuous growth of city sizes and exceeding the capacity of transportation technology,the collapse extent of the city sizes will be further enhanced.The findings support the hypothesis that the collapse of maximum city size is attributed to the presence of ag-glomeration diseconomies and constraints from the technological,economic,and managerial capabilities of large cities within a certain period.
city size distributionrank-size rulethe largest cityagglomeration diseconomiessubway
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
