La loi de Zipf dans la science régionale : entre anciennes controverses et nouvelles perspectives

Zipf’s law is one of the main features in regional sciences, when it comes in studying urban systems’ organization. By recalling the most representative studies on this issue, over the last thirty years, this paper aims to focus on the main controversies that characterize the rank-size models, that is, the use of a truncated city-size distribution and the method of estimating the Pareto exponent. The recent introduction of the rank-size models in a more dynamic approach opens up new perspectives in understanding the Zipf law, as the latter becomes the outcome of an urban growth process.