Monocentric or polycentric city? An empirical perspective

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Lemoy, Rémi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Lemoy, Rémi
author_facet Lemoy, Rémi
contents Do cities have just one or several centers? Studies performing radial or monocentric analyses of cities are usually criticised by researchers stating that cities are actually polycentric, and this has been well known for a long time. Reversely, when cities are studied independently of any center, other researchers will wonder how the variables of interest evolve with the distance to the center, because this distance is known to be a major determinant at the intra-urban scale. Both monocentric and polycentric formalisms have been introduced centuries (respectively, decades) ago for the study of urban areas, and used both on the empirical and the theoretical side in different disciplines (economics, geography, complex systems, physics...). The present work performs a synthesis of both viewpoints on cities, regarding their use in the literature, and explores with data on European urban areas how some cities considered to be the most polycentric in Europe compare to more standard cities when studied through a combination of radial analysis and scaling laws.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_07624
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Monocentric or polycentric city? An empirical perspective
Lemoy, Rémi
Physics and Society
Computers and Society
Do cities have just one or several centers? Studies performing radial or monocentric analyses of cities are usually criticised by researchers stating that cities are actually polycentric, and this has been well known for a long time. Reversely, when cities are studied independently of any center, other researchers will wonder how the variables of interest evolve with the distance to the center, because this distance is known to be a major determinant at the intra-urban scale. Both monocentric and polycentric formalisms have been introduced centuries (respectively, decades) ago for the study of urban areas, and used both on the empirical and the theoretical side in different disciplines (economics, geography, complex systems, physics...). The present work performs a synthesis of both viewpoints on cities, regarding their use in the literature, and explores with data on European urban areas how some cities considered to be the most polycentric in Europe compare to more standard cities when studied through a combination of radial analysis and scaling laws.
title Monocentric or polycentric city? An empirical perspective
topic Physics and Society
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.07624