Population size and centrality effects on NO 2 air pollution across and within European cities

Abstract

Understanding how nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) varies both within and across cities is essential for assessing urban health inequalities, yet the joint influence of city size and internal structure remains poorly quantified. While it is expected that agglomeration size increases NO₂ concentrations and that distance from major urban activities reduces them, the magnitude and form of their combined effect have not been established. Our objective is to move beyond city-specific local context effects and to characterize the general structural form of NO₂ distributions, understood as their systematic variation with distance from the center across cities of different sizes. Using both ground monitoring stations and satellite data for 378 European Functional Urban Areas, we estimate parallel models for each measurement type and show that the same structural relationships hold in both cases. We find that NO₂ concentrations increase with population size as a power law (with an exponent between 0.14 and 0.22) and decrease with distance from the city center (with an exponent between −0.12 and −0.18), with consistent results across measurement types and robust to local and regional controls. These effects combine into a scalable radial profile, where the total air pollution over a city is proportional to (N/r)^0.16, which generalizes the spatial distribution of NO₂ in European cities. This formulation clarifies how total and per-capita pollution depend on the extent to which pollution is integrated and provides a simple framework for evaluating the health implications of urban growth.