Administrative boundaries and urban areas in Italy: A perspective from scaling laws
Open accessAbstract
Delineating boundaries of urban areas is no easy task, due to the inherent complexity of the problem, heterogeneity of relevant data and little consensus on how to properly measure the results. Any such delineation must eventually be cast onto administrative boundaries, an essential requirement for real-world applications. In the effort of relating administrative and alternative boundaries, we investigated in Italy the validity of general scaling laws, such as the area-population relation, and proposed a practical application. Relying on open data for population, settlements and road networks, we showed the extent to which scaling relations hold for different boundaries for urban areas, and how they compare to each other. We considered, beside Italian municipalities, urban areas based on the idea of "natural cities", obtained using head/tail breaks of areas related to human mobility as an explicit indicator of existence of a city. Area-population data for administrative boundaries can be reconciled with scaling relations valid for both the world's cities data and with those obtained from natural cities, provided an effective area is adopted in place of polygon planimetric area of municipalities. We eventually proposed an aggregation of administrative units using the empirical scaling relation as an objective function for accepting or rejecting pairwise fusion of boundaries. We suggest considering such a method, along with expert considerations, as an additional tool for real-world urban planning as seen from the very general perspective of seemingly abstract scaling laws.
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The present analysis at the municipality level is not directly comparable with past works in urban scaling laws literature.
“It should be noted that the present analysis at the municipality level is not directly comparable with past works in urban scaling laws literature”
From Scaling Behavior of Public Procurement Activity (2021) · cites this paper as [39]
The Results section says the municipality-level effective-area–population relation “compares well with European cities data,” and the Discussion places its exponent within the range reported in earlier literature. The paper distinguishes raw municipal area from effective built-up area, but it does not characterize its municipality-level analysis as not directly comparable with past urban-scaling work. Page numbers are unavailable in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.76)
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Flagged first, then by citations
Research works printed but not linked: 2
- Alvioli M. Comparative study of delineation of urban areas using imperviousness products and open data Alvioli M. Marchesini I. Melelli L. Guth P. Proceedings of the Geomorphometry 2020 Conference 2020 CNR Edizioni Perugia, Italy 266 10.30437/GEOMORPHOMETRY2020_1 · DOI
- van Raan A.F.J. Urban scaling in Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands Relation with Governance Structures 2019 arXiv e-prints arXiv:1903.03004 · arXiv
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Scaling Behavior of Public Procurement Activity
Curado, A., Damásio, B., Encarnação, S., Candia, C., & Pinheiro, F. L. (2021) · PLOS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0260806 · Cited by 12 · see citing works
“It is noteworthy to mention that the present analysis at the municipality unit is not directly comparable with past works in urban scaling laws literature [39], which have focused on studying cities from a functional perspective [12, 18, 40–42].”
Result
- Authors
- Alvioli, M.
- Affiliations
- Research Institute for Geo-Hydrological Protection (IT)
- Corresponding author
- Alvioli, Massimiliano
- Venue
- Landscape and Urban Planning
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2020-12
- Volume
- 204
- Pages
- 103906
- ISSN
- 0169-2046 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC7424309
- OpenAlex
- W3048812303
- Cited by
- 34
- References
- 63
- Citations by year
- 2026: 5 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 7 · 2023: 6 · 2022: 4 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 1
- FWCI
- 2.12
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Landscape and Urban Planning (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Högskolan i Gävle
- Università degli Studi di Perugia
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Building and Construction › Urban Design and Spatial Analysis
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Regional Economics and Spatial Analysis
- Social Sciences › Urban Studies › Global Urban Networks and Dynamics
- Keywords
- urban area delineation, administrative boundaries, scaling laws, natural cities, human mobility, effective area, municipal boundaries, Italian municipalities, urban planning
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