CROSS-SCALE DYNAMICS OF A REGIONAL URBAN SYSTEM THROUGH TIME

Urban systems have been the subject of investigation for over a century. From central place and hierarchy theory to Gibrat’s and Zipf’s law, urban systems have been subjected to intense scrutiny. More recently, in a series of papers analyzing urban systems from the perspective of resilience and panarchy theory, urban systems have been characterized as scale-dependent. In this work, we examined the relationships between city size, growth rates, and the key factors that impact resilience and population dynamics in a regional urban system over time. Results of this work indicate that while there are similarities between cities, certain factors appear to be more important in one place than another, and that city growth is not random, but rather, correlated with key factors. In particular, we found that city growth was driven by mean household income and the percentage of the population of a city with a college degree.