James Fonseca

Abstract The traditional Zipfian approach allows the largest city’s population to dictate the formulation of the rank-size rule, producing unrealistic ideal distributions with total populations not matching those of actual city systems. The prevailing rank-size research paradigm focuses on assessing the deviation of the slope of the regression line fitting the actual city-size distribution from 1.0 but does not compare the actual distribution with the Zipfian distribution.