Rank-Size Rule
The rank-size rule is an empirical regularity describing the size distribution of cities within a country or region. In its simplest form, popularized by George Kingsley Zipf in 1949, the population of a city is inversely proportional to its rank, so the second-largest city is about half the size of the largest, the third about a third, and so on. Generalized to a power law with an exponent q, it provides a compact way to summarize how evenly or unevenly population is spread across a settlement system and to diagnose urban primacy.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Zipf, G. K. (1949). Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort. Addison-Wesley, Cambridge, MA. · ISBN 9781614273790
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.