Related papers: Constructing cities, deconstructing scaling laws
In 2012 the world's population exceeded 7 billion, and since 2008 the number of individuals living in urban areas has surpassed that of rural areas. This is the result of an overall increase of life expectancy in many countries that has…
The size of cities is known to play a fundamental role in social and economic life. Yet, its relation to the structure of the underlying network of human interactions has not been investigated empirically in detail. In this paper, we map…
A good understanding of cities is crucial to implement urban planning policies leading to social and economic sustainability and an efficient use of resources. While urban concentration has been associated with both positive and negative…
Urban-induced microclimate variations, such as urban heat islands and air pollution, scale with city size, producing distinctive relations between average climate variables and city-scale quantities (e.g., total population). However, these…
Cities play a pivotal role in human development and sustainability, yet studying them presents significant challenges due to the vast scale and complexity of spatial-temporal data. One such challenge is the need to uncover universal urban…
Urban systems present hierarchical structures at many different scales. These are observed as administrative regional delimitations which are the outcome of complex geographical, political and historical processes which leave almost…
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…
Commuting is a key mechanism that governs the dynamics of cities. Despite its importance, very little is known of the properties and mechanisms underlying this crucial urban process. Here, we capitalize on $\sim$ 50 million individuals'…
Scaling describes how a given quantity $Y$ that characterizes a system varies with its size $P$. For most complex systems it is of the form $Y\sim P^\beta$ with a nontrivial value of the exponent $\beta$, usually determined by regression…
Unveiling the relationships between crime and socioeconomic factors is crucial for modeling and preventing these illegal activities. Recently, a significant advance has been made in understanding the influence of urban metrics on the levels…
Understanding urban mobility requires models that capture how people interact with and navigate the built environment. We present a scalable, generalizable agent-based framework in which daily schedules emerge from the interplay between…
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…
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…
Scaling laws illuminate Nature's fundamental biological principles and guide bioinspired materials and structural designs. In simple cases they are based on the fundamental principle that all laws of nature remain unchanged (i.e.,…
We explain the anomaly of election results between large cities and rural areas in terms of urban scaling in the 1948-2016 US elections and in the 2016 EU referendum of the UK. The scaling curves are all universal and depend on a single…
The emerging field of the Science of Cities has unveiled previously undiscovered facets of urban life. Contrary to the expectation of chaotic behaviour influenced solely by cultural and geographic factors, cities globally exhibit universal…
Is there a general economic pathway recapitulated by individual cities over and over? Identifying such evolution structure, if any, would inform models for the assessment, maintenance, and forecasting of urban sustainability and economic…
The study of spacetime, and its role in understanding functional systems has received little attention in information science. Recent work, on the origin of universal scaling in cities and biological systems, provides an intriguing insight…
Urban outputs often scale superlinearly with city population. A difficulty in understanding the mechanism of this phenomenon is that different outputs differ considerably in their scaling behaviors. Here, we formulate a physics-based model…
The distribution of the population of cities has attracted a great deal of attention, in part because it sharply constrains models of local growth. However, to this day, there is no consensus on the distribution below the very upper tail,…