We probe the underlying organization emerging out of the growth of urban settlements by using various measures that quantify their spatial spreading. In particular, we report the emergence of fat-tailed regimes in the distributions of the three metrics we investigated in the case of the self-organized Metro Manila conurbation: (1) the city road lengths and the areas of road-bounded blocks; (2) the Voronoi areas, the effective “areas of influence” of each of the buildings in the city; and (3) the $k$-nearest-neighbor (kNN) distances of economic structures in the city. Statistical goodness-of-fit tests are conducted to obtain representative decaying power-law trends for these fat-tailed distributions, as a first approximation for the scaling behavior, particularly at the largest scales. The obtained distributions are found to differ significantly from the corresponding results generated from memoryless null models. The key insights from these data analyses add to the growing literature on quantitative characterizations of urban zones, and may help uncover the underlying mechanics responsible for growth.

我们通过使用各种量化其空间分布的方法来研究从城市居住区的增长中脱颖而出的基础组织。特别是，我们报告了在自组织的马尼拉大都会城市化情况下所调查的三个指标分布中出现的肥尾制度：（1）城市道路长度和路障区域；（2）Voronoi地区，城市中每栋建筑物的有效“影响区”；和（3）$ķ$城市中经济结构的近邻（kNN）距离。进行统计拟合优度检验以获得这些胖尾分布的代表性衰减幂律趋势，作为缩放行为的第一近似值，尤其是在最大缩放时。发现所获得的分布与从无记忆零模型产生的相应结果显着不同。这些数据分析的关键见识增加了有关城市地区定量特征的日益增长的文献，并可能有助于揭示造成增长的潜在机制。