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Abstract: Four phases of interest in the distribution of city sizes are identified and current conflict in the literature is shown to be a consequence of poorly-selected units of observation. When urban regions are properly defined, US urban growth obeys Gibrat’s Law and the city size distribution is strictly Zipfian rank-size with coefficient q =1.0. Care has to be taken with definition of the largest urban-economic regions, however; the fit in the upper tail of the distribution is best when they are recognized to be megalopolitan in scale. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]