City Growth as a Leap-frogging Process: An Application to the Tel-Aviv Metropolis

This paper presents an analysis of the spatial and temporal development of Tel-Aviv. The central notion in the analysis is the old concept of leap-frogging. Instead of seeing the population's evolution as a growth process from the centre of the metropolis outwards, we consider the population's development as taking place in different centres in a series of successive 'jumps'. In order to quantify the process, the growth of the centres' populations is fitted with the same mathematical function. This procedure enables us to extract the relevant parameters of each centre's growth and to make comparisons among them. We show that the population growth in the various centres is very similar. It permits the use of the scaling concept. In addition, a model of the growth of the individual centre is developed.