Kazuya Hayata
Department of Socio-Informatics, Sapporo Gakuin University, Ebetsu 069-8555, Japan
E-mail address: hayata1@hotmail.co.jp
(Received September 21, 2010; Accepted November 21, 2010)
Abstract. Effects of the large-scale municipal consolidation on a statistical property of urban areas in a geographical domain (a prefecture) are analyzed through rank-ordering statistics of the area data of cities. The validity of a regression model is confirmed with a residual analysis followed by Durbin-Watson testing. As specific domains, Japanese prefectures containing many cities (n ≥ 15, where n stands for the number of cities) are considered. The results show that the rapid consolidation, which is far from being spontaneous, has indeed dealt a fatal blow to an organized whole emerging via a long-term competitive coexistence among cities in a limited domain.
Keywords: Municipalization, Urban Dynamics, Self-Organized Cities, Rank-Size Rule