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A typology of activities over a century of urban growth

Nature Cities volume 1, pages 567–575 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Contemporary literature on the dynamics of economic activities in growing cities has mainly focused on time frames of a few years or decades. Using a new geohistorical database constructed from historical directories with about 1 million entries, we present a comprehensive analysis of the dynamics of activities in a major city, Paris, over almost a century (1829–1907). Our analysis suggests that activities that accompany city growth can be classified in different categories according to their dynamics and their scaling with population: (1) linear for everyday needs of residents (food stores, clothing retailers, health care practitioners), (2) sublinear for public services (legal, administrative, educational) and (3) superlinear for the city’s specific features (passing fads, specialization, timely needs). The dynamics of these activities is in addition very sensitive to historical perturbations such as large-scale public works or political conflicts. These results shed light on the evolution of activities, a crucial component of growing cities.

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Fig. 1: Number of city directory entries for different activity categories (Na) over time.
Fig. 2: Exponent β for different activity categories.
Fig. 3: Rank clocks for activity categories.

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Data availability

The dataset of the population censuses of Paris at the scale of districts between 1801 and 1911 is openly accessible with the documentation on the Nakala platform of the CNRS Research Infrastructure Huma-Num at https://doi.org/10.34847/nkl.e173c93p. The dataset of Paris directories entries with NAICS-inspired categories between 1829 and 1907 specifically constructed and used for this paper is openly accessible on the Zenodo platform https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8388101 (ref. 68).

Code availability

The open repository https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8388101 (ref. 68) contains the code to create the figures and tables of both the main text and the Supplementary Information.

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Acknowledgements

We thank N. Abadie, S. Baciocchi, P. Cristofoli, B. Duménieu, E. Carlinet, J. Chazalon and J. Perret, who set up the processing chain enabling the extraction and enrichment of Paris directories, and without whom this work would not have been possible. This research was funded by ANR SoDUCo Program, grant number ANR-18-CE38-0013 (J.G. and M.B.).

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  1. Centre de Recherches Historiques, EHESS (CNRS/EHESS), Paris, France

    Julie Gravier

  2. Centre d’Analyse et de Mathématique Sociales (CNRS/EHESS), Paris, France

    Julie Gravier & Marc Barthelemy

  3. Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, CEA, Institut de Physique Théorique, Gif-sur-Yvette, France

    Marc Barthelemy

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J.G. and M.B. designed the study. J.G. worked on the data and analyzed it. J.G. and M.B. wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Marc Barthelemy.

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Nature Cities thanks Cécile Tannier and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Gravier, J., Barthelemy, M. A typology of activities over a century of urban growth. Nat Cities 1, 567–575 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-024-00108-7

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