Zipfs law and city sizes: A short tutorial review on multiplicative processes in urban growth

We address the role of multiplicative stochastic processes in modeling the occurrence of power-law city size distributions. As an explanation of the result of Zipf’s rank analysis, Simon’s model is presented in a mathematically elementary way, with a thorough discussion of the involved hypotheses. Emphasis is put on the flexibility of the model, as to its possible extensions and the relaxation of some strong assumptions. We point out some open problems regarding the prediction of the detailed shape of Zipf’s rank plots, which may be tackled by means of such extensions.