Related papers: Constructing cities, deconstructing scaling laws
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…
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…
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…
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…
Scaling laws are powerful summaries of the variations of urban attributes with city size. However, the validity of their universal meaning for cities is hampered by the observation that different scaling regimes can be encountered for the…
Scaling has been proposed as a powerful tool to analyze the properties of complex systems, and in particular for cities where it describes how various properties change with population. The empirical study of scaling on a wide range of…
Urban scaling laws relate socio-economic, behavioral, and physical variables to the population size of cities and allow for a new paradigm of city planning, and an understanding of urban resilience and economies. Independently of culture…
In several recent publications, Bettencourt, West and collaborators claim that properties of cities such as gross economic production, personal income, numbers of patents filed, number of crimes committed, etc., show super-linear…
Analyses of urban scaling laws assume that observations in different cities are independent of the existence of nearby cities. Here we introduce generative models and data-analysis methods that overcome this limitation by modelling…
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,…
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…
The shape of urban settlements plays a fundamental role in their sustainable planning. Properly defining the boundaries of cities is challenging and remains an open problem in the Science of Cities. Here, we propose a worldwide model to…
The scaling relations between city attributes and population are emergent and ubiquitous aspects of urban growth. Quantifying these relations and understanding their theoretical foundation, however, is difficult due to the challenge of…
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…
More than a half of world population is now living in cities and this number is expected to be two-thirds by 2050. Fostered by the relevancy of a scientific characterization of cities and for the availability of an unprecedented amount of…
The current science of cities can provide a useful foundation for future urban policies, provided that these proposals have been validated by correct observations of the diversity of situations in the world. However, international…
Understanding scaling relations of social and environmental attributes of urban systems is necessary for effectively managing cities. Urban scaling theory (UST) has assumed that population density scales positively with city size. We…
Despite the rapid growth of cities in the past century, our quantitative, in-depth understanding of how cities grow remains limited due to a consistent lack of historical data. Thus, the scaling laws between a city's features and its…
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…
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…