Changes at the Top: A Cross-country Examination over the 20th Century of the Rise (and Fall) in Rank of the Top Cities in National Urban Hierarchies
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper documents the evolution of rank orders for cities at the top of national urban hierarchies (top 10 cities, where possible). Ranks for the year 2000 are compared with 1950 for 74 nations and with 1900 for 52 nations, covering 375 and 288 cities respectively. Rank correlations with the year 2000 are calculated for both years. The rank order of cities in Europe shows significantly less variation over time than those for the New World and developing nations, consistent with the view that urban hierarchies harden as they mature. Changes in rank at the very top (rank 1) are rare. Where they occur, such changes can often be traced to political events that alter the direction of trade or the city’s role as central place. The results provide evidence both for and against locational fundamentals and cumulative causation arguments. The entrenched advantages of the first big cities to emerge are undeniable; but ‘fundamentals’ can be undermined by political events and by technological change.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it