Related papers: Constructing cities, deconstructing scaling laws
In this commentary we discuss the validity of scaling laws and their relevance for understanding urban systems and helping policy makers. We show how the recent controversy about the scaling of CO2 transport-related emissions with…
Challenges due to the rapid urbanization of the world -- especially in emerging countries -- range from an increasing dependence on energy, to air pollution, socio-spatial inequalities, environmental and sustainability issues. Modelling the…
The quest for a theory of cities that could offer a quantitative and systematic approach to manage cities is at the top priority, given the challenges humanity faces due to the increasing urbanization and densification of cities. If such a…
Numerous urban indicators scale with population in a power law across cities, but whether the cross-sectional scaling law is applicable to the temporal growth of individual cities is unclear. Here we first find two paradoxical scaling…
Urban population scaling of resource use, creativity metrics, and human behaviors has been widely studied. These studies have not looked in detail at the full range of human environments which represent a continuum from the most rural to…
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…
Urban morphology has presented significant intellectual challenges to mathematicians and physicists ever since the eighteenth century, when Euler first explored the famous Konigsberg bridges problem. Many important regularities and scaling…
During the last years, the new science of municipalities has been established as a fertile quantitative approach to systematically understand the urban phenomena. One of its main pillars is the proposition that urban systems display…
Given that a group of cities follows a scaling law connecting urban population with socio-economic or infrastructural metrics (transversal scaling), should we expect that each city would follow the same behavior over time (longitudinal…
Urban scaling and Zipf's law are two fundamental paradigms for the science of cities. These laws have mostly been investigated independently and are often perceived as disassociated matters. Here we present a large scale investigation about…
We have assembled CO2 emission figures from collections of urban GHG emission estimates published in peer reviewed journals or reports from research institutes and non-governmental organizations. Analyzing the scaling with population size…
Cities are systems with a large number of constituents and agents interacting with each other and can be considered as emblematic of complex systems. Modeling these systems is a real challenge and triggered the interest of many disciplines…
Given the importance of urban sustainability and resilience to the future of our planet, there is a need to better understand the interconnectedness between the social, economic, environmental, and governance outcomes that underline these…
The interaction of all mobile species with their environment hinges on their movement patterns: the places they visit and how frequently they go there. In human society, where the prevalent form of cohabitation is in cities, the highly…
The science of cities seeks to understand and explain regularities observed in the world's major urban systems. Modelling the population evolution of cities is at the core of this science and of all urban studies. Quantitatively, the most…
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…
Cities are centers for the integration of capital and incubators of invention, and attracting venture capital (VC) is of great importance for cities to advance in innovative technology and business models towards a sustainable and…
We investigated the socioeconomic scaling behavior of all cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants in the Netherlands and found significant superlinear scaling of gross urban product with population size. Of these cities, 22 major cities…
The amount of data that is being gathered about cities is increasing in size and specificity. However, despite this wealth of information, we still have little understanding of what really drives the processes behind urbanisation. In this…
Many aggregate distributions of urban activities such as city sizes reveal scaling but hardly any work exists on the properties of spatial distributions within individual cities, notwithstanding considerable knowledge about their fractal…