I'm not sure if this is the right community to ask this, so let me know if it's not.
I'm wondering if there's been some empirical research as to how villages and cities are distributed around other cities.
If one looks at a map, usually there's some clustering around big cities visible. I'm wondering if the distance from that central, big city to villages or cities around is follows some kind of probability distribution.
Indeed interesting, and probably one cannot find a distribution that fits cities all around the world, but that doesn't matter so much.
I'm looking to find some kind of pattern in city distribution, here's why:
I want to create realistic data set of point in the plane that represent places (e.g.: cities, villages, ...). Uniformly generating these won't be a good idea, since this is not realistic in my opinion.