Related papers: Constructing cities, deconstructing scaling laws
Intensive development of urban systems creates a number of challenges for urban planners and policy makers in order to maintain sustainable growth. Running efficient urban policies requires meaningful urban metrics, which could quantify…
Ecosystems and other naturally resilient systems exhibit allometric scaling in the distribution of sizes of their elements. In this paper we define an allometry inspired scaling indicator for cities that is a first step towards quantifying…
Recent advances in the urban science make broad use of the notion of scaling. We focus here on the important scaling relationship between the gross metropolitan product (GMP) of a city and its population (pop). It has been demonstrated that…
Measures of wealth and production have been found to scale superlinearly with the population of a city. Therefore, it makes economic sense for humans to congregate together in dense settlements. A recent model of population dynamics showed…
Demographic heterogeneity is often studied through the geographical lens. Therefore it is considered at a predetermined spatial resolution, which is a suitable choice to understand scalefull phenomena. Spatial autocorrelation indices are…
How does the shape of a network change as its size increases? Although random graph models provide some expectations for such "scaling behaviors" in the structure of networks, relatively little is known about how empirical network structure…
Using demographic data of high spatial resolution for a region in the south of Europe, we study the population over fixed-size spatial cells. We find that, counterintuitively, the distribution of the number of inhabitants per cell increases…
City size distributions are known to be well approximated by power laws across a wide range of countries. But such distributions are also meaningful at other spatial scales, such as within certain regions of a country. Using data from…
An important issue in the study of cities is defining a metropolitan area, as different definitions affect the statistical distribution of urban activity. A commonly employed method of defining a metropolitan area is the Metropolitan…
A city (or an urban cluster) is not an isolated spatial unit, but a combination of areas with closely linked socio-economic activities. However, so far, we lack a consistent and quantitative approach to define multi-level urban clusters…
Urban morphological measures applied at a high-resolution of spatial analysis can yield a wealth of data describing characteristics of the urban environment in a substantial degree of detail; however, such forms of high-dimensional numeric…
Many large cities are found at locations with certain first nature advantages. Yet, those exogenous locational features may not be the most potent forces governing the spatial pattern of cities. In particular, population size, spacing and…
Understanding demographic and migrational patterns constitutes a great challenge. Millions of individual decisions, motivated by economic, political, demographic, rational, and/or emotional reasons underlie the high complexity of…
Universality in the behavior of complex systems often reveals itself in the form of scale-invariant distributions that are essentially independent of the details of the microscopic dynamics. A representative paradigm of complex behavior in…
Complex systems have become a popular lens for analyzing cities and complexity theory has many implications for urban performance and resilience. This paper develops a typology of measures and indicators for assessing the physical…
Spatial organisation of physical form of an urban system, or city, both manifests and influences the way its social form functions. Mathematical quantification of the spatial pattern of a city is, therefore, important for understanding…
Neural scaling laws establish a predictable relationship between model performance and data or compute, offering crucial guidance for resource allocation in new domains and tasks. Yet such laws are most needed precisely where they are…
Cities are living organisms. They are out of equilibrium, open systems that never stop developing and sometimes die. The local geography can be compared to a shell constraining its development. In brief, a city's current layout is a step in…
We study how urban quality evolves as a result of carbon dioxide emissions as urban agglomerations grow. We employ a bottom-up approach combining two unprecedented microscopic data on population and carbon dioxide emissions in the…
We analyze a scaling law for the consumption of agricultural soil by cities. The nonlinear dependence of the size of the city on the number of inhabitants gives rise to an equation for population dynamics. We found the asymptotic limit of…