Exploring Zipf's Law and Population Density Patterns in Metropolitan İstanbul's Neighborhoods: a Spatial Insight

Abstract

Most studies on size distributions focus on examining rank-size distributions at urban or regional scale, but they often overlook their spatial dependencies, distributions, and neighboring relationships. This study aims to test Zipf 's Law at the neighborhood scale of Metropolitan Istanbul, analyze its spatial dependencies, and investigate their spatial behavioral patterns in urban areas over the past decade. Initially, we found that Zipf 's Law is not valid at the neighborhood scale of Istanbul. Secondly, we identified significant spatial dependencies in neighborhood population densities, observed clustering of high- and low-density neighborhoods in different locations, and detected their influences from adjacent neighborhood densities. Thirdly, we observed that population dynamics are directly affected by urban policies. Based on these findings, when spatial dependencies are considered as essential factors and analyzed in detail at lower scales, population density can provide preliminary insight into the social, economic, and political processes occurring in the city.