For the first time the systems of cities in seven countries or regions among
the largest in the world (China, India, Brazil, Europe, the Former Soviet Union
(FSU), the United States and South Africa) are made comparable through the
building of spatio-temporal standardised statistical databases. We first
explain the concept of a generic evolutionary urban unit ("city") and its
necessary adaptations to the information provided by each national statistical
system. Second, the hierarchical structure and the urban growth process are
compared at macro-scale for the seven countries with reference to Zipf's and
Gibrat's model: in agreement with an evolutionary theory of urban systems,
large similarities shape the hierarchical structure and growth processes in
BRICS countries as well as in Europe and United States, despite their positions
at different stages in the urban transition that explain some structural
peculiarities. Third, the individual trajectories of some 10,000 cities are
mapped at micro-scale following a cluster analysis of their evolution over the
last fifty years. A few common principles extracted from the evolutionary
theory of urban systems can explain the diversity of these trajectories,
including a specific pattern in their geographical repartition in the Chinese
case. We conclude that the observations at macro-level when summarized as
stylised facts can help in designing simulation models of urban systems whereas
the urban trajectories identified at micro-level are consistent enough for
constituting the basis of plausible future population projections.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures; Pumain, Denise, et al. "Multilevel comparison of
large urban systems." Cybergeo: European Journal of Geography (2015