URBAN CHARACTERISTICS OF QASSIM REGION, AN APPLIED STUDY WITH RANK-SIZE RULE ACCORDING TO 2010 CENSUS | ||||
| Journal of Urban Research | ||||
| Article 4, Volume 47, Issue 2, April 2023, Page 69-85 PDF (777.06 K) | ||||
| Document Type: Original Article | ||||
| DOI: 10.21608/jur.2022.128950.1092 | ||||
 View on SCiNiTO | ||||
| Author | ||||
Mustafa Mohamed Ali Abbakar  
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| Department of Geography, Collage of Arabic Language and Social Studies, Qassim University,Qassim, Saudi Arabia | ||||
| Abstract | ||||
| In the context of geographical quantitative revolution around the mid-20th century, George K Zipf’s model emerged, which was designed to measure sizes of cities by their population in what is known as the rank-size rule. It is important to apply that scientific base to measure sizes of cities at state level as well as level of administrative regions within the state. This is the scope of this study, which sought to apply the rule to the cities of Qassim region as a geographical unit within Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The aim of the research is to study the urban system in Qassim and discover the urban hierarchy that runs the governorates within their administrative boundaries. The main question of the study was: What is the balanced geographical rank of the cities of Qassim region? The tools of the geographical statistical method were used to display and analyze data, where most important results were: The urban system in Qassim region is dominated by the city of Buraidah, which contains most of the geographical factors that formed the urban sites and their environmental conditions. The study concluded that the urban system in Qassim enjoys a natural formative background that depends on the fertile lands around its cities, whose characteristics are similar and their main features converge. In spite of this, the consequence of applying Zipf's rank-size rule was that: cities are far from the straight equilibrium line of the vertices of their sizes. | ||||
| Keywords | ||||
| geographical rank; cities, Qassim region; rank-size rule | ||||
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