  Cities can be characterised and modelled through different urban measures.
Consistency within these observables is crucial in order to advance towards a
science of cities. Bettencourt et al have proposed that many of these urban
measures can be predicted through universal scaling laws. We develop a
framework to consistently define cities, using commuting to work and population
density thresholds, and construct thousands of realisations of systems of
cities with different boundaries for England and Wales. These serve as a
laboratory for the scaling analysis of a large set of urban indicators. The
analysis shows that population size alone does not provide enough information
to describe or predict the state of a city as previously proposed, indicating
that the expected scaling laws are not corroborated. We found that most urban
indicators scale linearly with city size regardless of the definition of the
urban boundaries. However, when non-linear correlations are present, the
exponent fluctuates considerably.
