Related papers: Scaling and Hierarchy in Urban Economies

Recent studies of urban scaling show that important socioeconomic city characteristics such as wealth and innovation capacity exhibit a nonlinear, particularly a power law scaling with population size. These nonlinear effects are common to…

We study the scaling of (i) numbers of workers and aggregate incomes by occupational categories against city size, and (ii) total incomes against numbers of workers in different occupations, across the functional metropolitan areas of…

Cities are often compared through scaling laws, usually expressed as power-law relations between population size and aggregate urban quantities related to infrastructure, socioeconomic activity, or environmental impacts. These laws are…

Many outputs of cities scale in universal ways, including infrastructure, crime, and economic activity. Through a mathematical model, this study investigates the interplay between such scaling laws in human organization and governmental…

Understanding quantitative relationships between urban elements is crucial for a wide range of applications. The observation at the macroscopic level demonstrates that the aggregated urban quantities (e.g., gross domestic product) scale…

Superlinear scaling in cities, which appears in sociological quantities such as economic productivity and creative output relative to urban population size, has been observed but not been given a satisfactory theoretical explanation. Here…

Developing a scientific understanding of cities in a fast urbanizing world is essential for planning sustainable urban systems. Recently, it was shown that income and wealth creation follow increasing returns, scaling superlinearly with…

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…

Understanding cities is central to addressing major global challenges from climate and health to economic resilience. Although increasingly perceived as fundamental socio-economic units, the detailed fabric of urban economic activities is…

Understanding how size influences the internal characteristics of a system is a crucial concern across various fields. Concepts like scale invariance, universalities, and fractals are fundamental to this inquiry and find application in…

Cities are some of the most intricate and advanced creations of humanity. Most objects in cities are perfectly synchronised to coordinate activities such as jobs, education, transportation, entertainment, and waste management. Although each…

Hierarchies can be modeled by a set of exponential functions, from which we can derive a set of power laws indicative of scaling. The solution to a scaling relation equation is always a power law. The scaling laws are followed by many…

A longstanding puzzle in urban science is whether there's an intrinsic match between human populations and the mass of their built environments. Previous findings have revealed various urban properties scaling nonlinearly with population,…

Over the last decades, in disciplines as diverse as economics, geography, and complex systems, a perspective has arisen proposing that many properties of cities are quantitatively predictable due to agglomeration or scaling effects. Using…

According to the theory of urban scaling, urban indicators scale with city size in a predictable fashion. In particular, indicators of social and economic productivity are expected to have a superlinear relation. This behavior was verified…

City-size distributions follow an approximate power law in various countries despite high volatility in relative city sizes over time. Our empirical evidence for the United States and Japan indicates that the scaling law stems from a…

The prevalence of many urban phenomena changes systematically with population size. We propose a theory that unifies models of economic complexity and cultural evolution to derive urban scaling. The theory accounts for the difference in…

The recent availability of data for cities has allowed scientists to exhibit scalings which present themselves in the form of a power-law dependence with population of various socio-economical and structural indicators. We propose here a…

There is strong expectation that cities, across time, culture and level of development, share much in common in terms of their form and function. Recently, attempts to formalize mathematically these expectations have led to the hypothesis…

Publicly traded companies are fundamental units of contemporary economies and markets and are important mechanisms through which humans interact with their environments. Understanding the general properties that underlie the processes of…