Size Distributions for Morphological Slums in Asia and South America

The size distribution of cities within countries was investigated for several years, leading to the famous Zipf's law. The question arises if there are similarities between city size distributions across countries and the distribution of a specific urban class: slums. We investigate the size distribution of morphological slums classified by using remote sensing data in three Asian and three South American cities using three different distribution functions (Generalized Pareto Distribution, Lognormal Distribution, and Double Pareto Lognormal Distribution) which have been used in the context of inter urban size distributions before. We applied different goodness of fit tests showing that the Double Pareto Lognormal is the best function for both investigated global regions. We find that intra-urban size distributions of slums can be described with similar distribution functions as city size distributions across countries.