English

On Metropolis Growth

Physics and Society 2017-12-18 v2 Econometrics

Abstract

We consider the scaling laws, second-order statistics and entropy of the consumed energy of metropolis cities which are hybrid complex systems comprising social networks, engineering systems, agricultural output, economic activity and energy components. We abstract a city in terms of two fundamental variables; ss resource cells (of unit area) that represent energy-consuming geographic or spatial zones (e.g. land, housing or infrastructure etc.) and a population comprising nn mobile units that can migrate between these cells. We show that with a constant metropolis area (fixed ss), the variance and entropy of consumed energy initially increase with nn, reach a maximum and then eventually diminish to zero as saturation is reached. These metrics are indicators of the spatial mobility of the population. Under certain situations, the variance is bounded as a quadratic function of the mean consumed energy of the metropolis. However, when population and metropolis area are endogenous, growth in the latter is arrested when ns2log(s)n\leq\frac{s}{2}\log(s) due to diminished population density. Conversely, the population growth reaches equilibrium when nslognn\geq {s}\log{n} or equivalently when the aggregate of both over-populated and under-populated areas is large. Moreover, we also draw the relationship between our approach and multi-scalar information, when economic dependency between a metropolis's sub-regions is based on the entropy of consumed energy. Finally, if the city's economic size (domestic product etc.) is proportional to the consumed energy, then for a constant population density, we show that the economy scales linearly with the surface area (or ss).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1712.02937,
  title  = {On Metropolis Growth},
  author = {Syed Amaar Ahmad},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1712.02937},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

19 pages, 16 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T23:11:57.487Z