Related papers: Constructing cities, deconstructing scaling laws
Critical states are sometimes identified experimentally through power-law statistics or universal scaling functions. We show here that such features naturally emerge from networks in self-sustained irregular regimes away from criticality.…
Urban systems are intrinsically complex, involving different dimensions and scales, and consequently various approaches and scientific disciplines. In that context, urban simulation models have been coined as essential for the construction…
Scale-adjusted metrics (SAMs) are a significant achievement of the urban scaling hypothesis. SAMs remove the inherent biases of per capita measures computed in the absence of isometric allometries. However, this approach is limited to urban…
Since the industrial revolution, accelerated urban growth has overflown administrative divisions, merged cities into large built extensions, and blurred the boundaries between urban and rural land-uses. These traits, present in most of…
Research done during the previous century established our Standard Cosmological Model. There are many details still to be filled in, but few would seriously doubt the basic premise. Past surveys have revealed that the large-scale…
A most debated topic of the last years is whether simple statistical physics models can explain collective features of social dynamics. A necessary step in this line of endeavour is to find regularities in data referring to large scale…
Human settlements on Earth are scattered in a multitude of shapes, sizes and spatial arrangements. These patterns are often not random but a result of complex geographical, cultural, economic and historical processes that have profound…
At large scales, typologies of urban form and corresponding generating processes remain an open question with important implications regarding urban planning policies and sustainability. We propose in this paper to generate urban…
The distribution of facilities is closely related to our social economic activities. Recent studies have reported a scaling relation between population and facility density with the exponent depending on the type of facility. In this paper,…
Urban land growth presents a major sustainability challenge, yet its growth patterns and dynamics remain unclear. We quantified urban land evolution by analyzing its statistical distribution in 14 regions and countries over 29 years. The…
Evidences are presented concerning tantalizing regularities in cities' population-flows in what regards to space and time correlations. The former exhibit a distance-behavior (for large distances) compatible with the inverse square law,…
Urban sprawl reshapes cities, yet its quantitative laws remain elusive. Analyzing built-up expansion in 19 cities (1985-2015) with tools from surface growth physics in radial geometry, we reveal anisotropic, branch-like growth and a…
Entropy relates the fast, microscopic behaviour of the elements in a system to its slow, macroscopic state. We propose to use it to explain how, as complexity theory suggests, small scale decisions of individuals form cities. For this, we…
In this paper, we develop a novel approach to measuring urban sprawl based on street nodes and naturally defined urban boundaries, both extracted from massive volunteered geographic information OpenStreetMap databases through some…
In an impending urban age where the majority of the world's population will live in cities, it is critical that we improve our understanding of the strengths and limitations of existing city designs to ensure they are safe, clean, can…
We investigate the socioeconomic urban scaling behavior in Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands. In the case of Denmark we examine the scaling of larger cities, municipalities within the Copenhagen agglomeration, and municipalities in…
As of 2014, 54% of the earth's population resides in urban areas, and it is steadily increasing, expecting to reach 66% by 2050. Urban areas range from small cities with tens of thousands of people to megacities with greater than 10 million…
Study of urban form is an important area of research in urban planning/design that contributes to our understanding of how cities function and evolve. However, classical approaches are based on very limited observations and inconsistent…
Highly accurate estimates of the urban fractal dimension $D_f$ are obtained by implementing the Detrended Moving Average algorithm (DMA) on WorldView2 satellite high-resolution multi-spectral images covering the largest European cities.…
We study the finite-size scaling behaviour at the critical point, resulting from the addition of a homogeneous size-dependent perturbation, decaying as an inverse power of the system size. The scaling theory is first formulated in a general…