Why Do Cities Exist, and What Makes Them Grow? Image by Vacades
Wendover Productions explores the idea of Zipf’s Law, which states that within each country, the population of the second largest city will be around half of the population of the largest city, the population of the third largest city will be around a third of the population of the largest city, and so on. In other words, the population of a city is approximately inversely proportional to its rank. This mathematical phenomenon does not only hold true for the distribution of populations in cities, but also in various other parts of our world: the ranking of the most commonly used words, the diameter of moon craters, the popularity of opening chess moves—all of these seem to follow Zipf’s Law, with no definite answer to why. This suggests that the distribution of population density across the world follows natural laws, and this could play into the ways in which we make decisions about the design of our cities. [Full article]
Source: Archdaily
