Bosker, M. (2022). City origins Regional Science and Urban Economics, 94.

The urban history, archeology, regional science and urban economics literatures all stress many different locational characteristics as important in driving city location. The availability of ever better, spatially more fine-grained, data on the historical and geographical characteristics of cities, and of locations that never developed into a city, makes it possible to start to enrich this debate with (much-needed) empirical evidence. Using this data in combination with more advanced empirical and computational methods will almost surely give us a better, empirically well-grounded, understanding of the relative importance of the many alleged 'city seeds' in different parts of the world and at different points in history.