An Analysis on Regularity of City Population Distribution in City System

Abstract

The city system transfigures in response to the spatial changes of economic activities in the globalized economy. The analysis of the relationships between the city system and performance of the regional economic activity is indispensable for analyzing the influence of broadening economic activity on the city systems in regions. Distribution of city population is considered as a phenomenon expressing the characteristics of a city system. And the rank-size rule is widely used as a theory on city population distribution. The primary purpose of this paper is to introduce a method to describe in detail the change in city population distribution from the viewpoint of the rank-size rule. After an explanation of the derivation methods of the rank-size rule, an analytical framework is proposed which connects the population change of the cities constituting the city system and the largest city. Then it is analyzed on this framework how the city population fluctuation changes the ranks of the cities in the city system. In this analysis, an improved method is introduced to grasp how much the position of a city relatively changes in a city system even if the city remains in the same rank in the city system.