Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands.
PLoS One. 2020 Sep 4;15(9):e0238418. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0238418. eCollection 2020.
We investigate socio-economic urban scaling behavior of municipalities in Denmark, the Netherlands, and in particular in Germany. Our interest is twofold. First we investigate whether, and to what extent, scaling occurs in various types of urban areas. The second important topic of research concerns the comparison of specific types of urban areas with regard to the values of the gross urban product. This is a new approach: two scaling systems are compared not only in terms of the scaling exponent, but also in terms of the differences in the gross urban product. We are specifically interested in the role of urban governance in terms of local urban government structures. Germany is our central case because it works as a natural experiment: a large number of urban areas is one-governance, but others are not. More specifically, we distinguish between cities of which the surrounding urban area belongs to the municipality of the city (kreisfreie cities), and those specific districts (Kreise) which are urban areas consisting of several municipalities. Our findings suggest that urban areas with one municipality perform better than urban areas with fragmented governance structures. We also investigate the relation between scaling of Kreise and simple measures of centrality, including the Zipf-distribution. A strong relation is found between the measured residuals of the scaling equations and the socio-economic position of cities assessed with a set of different socio-economic indicators. Given the debate on the effectiveness of municipal reform, our results may lead to challenging conclusions about the importance of one-municipality instead of multi-municipality governance in urban areas. These results are relevant for policy as they suggest that there is a benefit to unifying the governance structure of compact urban agglomerations.
我们研究了丹麦、荷兰，尤其是德国的各城市在社会经济方面的城市规模分布规律。我们的研究兴趣有两个方面。首先，我们研究在不同类型的城市地区是否存在以及在何种程度上存在规模分布规律。第二个重要的研究课题是比较各种类型城市地区的总城市产品的价值。这是一种新的方法：我们不仅根据规模分布律指数比较两个规模分布律系统，还比较总城市产品的差异。我们特别关注城市治理在地方城市政府结构方面的作用。德国是我们的核心案例，因为它是一个自然实验：大量的城市地区是单一治理的，而其他地区则不是。更具体地说，我们区分了那些其周边城市地区属于城市自治市的城市（kreisfreie Städte），以及那些由多个自治市组成的特定区（Kreise）。我们的研究结果表明，单一治理结构的城市地区的表现要好于治理结构分散的城市地区。我们还研究了 Kreise 的规模分布律与中心性的简单度量之间的关系，包括 Zipf 分布。我们发现，衡量的规模分布律方程残差与用一系列不同社会经济指标评估的城市的社会经济地位之间存在很强的关系。考虑到关于市政改革效果的争论，我们的研究结果可能会对单一自治市治理而非多自治市治理在城市地区的重要性产生具有挑战性的结论。这些结果与政策相关，因为它们表明统一紧凑城市群的治理结构具有益处。
