Simulation Analysis of the Fractality of Cities

Fractality in cities implies that a city possesses a similar structure at several different scales. Its existence is of great significance because it suggests the presence of some hidden process that operates at different urban scales and generates similarity. Recently, we studied the Tel Aviv metropolis at the levels of the entire metropolis and of one of its constituent towns. We concluded that the apparent growth mechanism (called leapfrogging) operates at these two levels. We hypothesized that since it appears at several levels, growth by leapfrogging may be one the fundamental processes that generates urban fractality. In this paper we present results of simulations used to verify this assumption in the case of randomly generated structures.