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Scaling of Geographic Space from the
Perspective of City and Field Blocks and
Using Volunteered Geographic Information
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Bin Jiang and Xintao Liu
Introduction
Scaling of geographic space refers to the fact that for a large geographic area,
the small constituents or units are far more common than the large ones
(Jiang 2010). For example, there are far more short streets than long ones
(Jiang 2007, Kalapala etal. 2006); far more small city blocks than large ones
(Lämmer etal. 2006); far more small cities than large ones, a phenomenon
referred to as Zipf’s law (1949); far more short axial lines than long ones (Jiang
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