Title: Sequential city growth: Empirical evidence
Author: David Cuberes
University of Alicante, Dpto. Fundamentos del Análisis Económico, Ctra. San Vicente s/n, 03690 San Vicente, Alicante, Spain

Published by: Journal of Urban Economics

Abstract: Using two comprehensive datasets on populations of cities and metropolitan areas for a large set of countries,
I present three new empirical facts about the evolution of city growth. First, the distribution of cities’
growth rates is skewed to the right in most countries and decades. Second, within a country, the
average rank of each decade’s fastest-growing cities tends to rise over time. Finally, this rank increases
faster in periods of rapid growth in urban population. These facts can be interpreted as evidence in favor
of the hypothesis that historically, urban agglomerations have followed a sequential growth pattern:
Within a country, the initially largest city is the first to grow rapidly for some years. At some point,
the growth rate of this city slows down and the second-largest city then becomes the fastest-growing
one. Eventually, the third-largest city starts growing fast as the two largest cities slow down, and so on.


Key words: Sequential city growth
Urbanization
City size distribution
Urban primacy
Gibrat’s law