title: The fractal city theory revisited: new empirical evidence from the distribution of Romanian cities and towns.
abstract: Some of the main ideas of the fractal city theory are briefly reviewed, and their applicability is tested for the medium and small-size Romanian urban settlements. The universality of Zipf law for cities and towns distribution is proved once again and a stochastic master equation is proposed in order to explain the empirical distribution. The urban structure of Bucharest is investigated as an example of medium-size city formed by merging some independent poles of growth. The Central Places Theory is found to be in disagreement with the real urban structure. Instead, the diffusion-limited aggregation and self-organized criticality mechanisms are investigated by means of some numerical simulations and are found to fit better the urban perimeter growth.
authors.affiliation: High School V. Alecsandri, Sabaoani Neamt, Romania.
authors.forename: Liliana
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Gligor
authors.forename: Mircea
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Gligor
mesh_terms: D003196:Computer Graphics; D003198:Computer Simulation; D003710:Demography; D017709:Fractals; D006801:Humans; D015233:Models, Statistical; D011158:Population Growth; D012383:Romania; D013037:Spatial Behavior; D014505:Urban Population / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*