| Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences, Vol. 12, Iss. 1, Jan, 2008, pp. 15-28 @2008 Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology & Life Sciences The Fractal City Theory Revisited: New Empirical Evidence from the Distribution of Romanian Cities and Towns Abstract: Some of the main ideas of the fractal city theory are briefly
reviewed, and their applicability is tested for the medium and small-size
Romanian urban settlements. The universality of Zipf law for cities and
towns distribution is proved once again and a stochastic master equation
is proposed in order to explain the empirical distribution. The urban
structure of Bucharest is investigated as an example of medium-size city
formed by merging some independent poles of growth. The Central Places Theory
is found to be in disagreement with the real urban structure. Instead,
the diffusion-limited aggregation and self-organized criticality mechanisms
are investigated by means of some numerical simulations and are found
to fit better the urban perimeter growth. Keywords: Zipf law, master equation, diffusion-limited aggregation, self-organization, urban growth |