Epistemological and Critical Examination of Urban Scaling Laws

In this chapter, the authors show how new proposals for scaling laws fit into the theories and models developed over several decades to explain the hierarchical organization and dynamics of cities. They review the multiple meanings and implications of the concept of scale when it is applied to cities and systems of cities. Next, the authors compare the contributions of recent theories associated with scaling laws with the knowledge previously acquired over several decades on urban hierarchies and centralities. They then more accurately gauge the scope of these transdisciplinary innovations for the analysis and planning of the future of cities. The modifiable areal unit problem is the geographical avatar of an epistemological problem shared by all the humanities and natural sciences: the ecological fallacy, which can occur when analyzing or inferring processes determined at a certain level of observation by relating them to objects located at another level.