THE FRENCH OVERALL CITY SIZE DISTRIBUTION

We analyze the overall size distribution across all French settlements in the year 2008. The sizes of the largest French cities follow the famous Zipf's law fairly closely, with Paris being a notable outlier. However, for the overall city size distribution (CSD), Zipf's law is not a useful approximation. We show that the lognormal (LN) distribution does a reasonable job in fitting the overall French CSD. Yet, it is clearly outperformed by a different parameterization the double Pareto lognormal (DPLN) distribution. This is consistent with our previous findings for city sizes in the US and other countries. We discuss the implications of these results for urban growth theory.