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Related papers: Constructing cities, deconstructing scaling laws

200 papers

We study the distribution of neighborhoods across a set of 12 global cities and find that the distribution of neighborhood sizes follows exponential decay across all cities under consideration. We are able to analytically show that this…

Physics and Society · Physics 2020-10-15 Anand Sahasranaman , Henrik Jeldtoft Jensen

Large language models with a huge number of parameters, when trained on near internet-sized number of tokens, have been empirically shown to obey neural scaling laws: specifically, their performance behaves predictably as a power law in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-01 Alexander Maloney , Daniel A. Roberts , James Sully

The production of waste as a consequence of human activities is one of the most fundamental challenges facing our society and global ecological systems. Waste generation is rapidly increasing, with corresponding shifts in the structure of…

Physics and Society · Physics 2022-08-18 Mingzhen Lu , Chuanbin Zhou , Chenghao Wang , Robert B. Jackson , Christopher P. Kempes

Urban morphology has a significant impact on sustainable urban outcomes in the ecological, social, and economic sectors. Nonetheless, academics lack clarity and consensus on how to quantify urban morphology indicators, which impedes…

Physics and Society · Physics 2025-08-13 Mahshid Gorjian

We study a few dynamical systems composed of many components whose sizes evolve according to multiplicative stochastic rules. We compare them with respect to the emergence of power laws in the size distribution of their components. We show…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2007-05-23 Aharon Blank , Sorin Solomon

It is very important to understand urban mobility patterns because most trips are concentrated in urban areas. In the paper, a new model is proposed to model collective human mobility in urban areas. The model can be applied to predict…

Physics and Society · Physics 2014-10-28 Xiao Liang , Jichang Zhao , Li Dong , Ke Xu

Due to the rapid growth of urban areas in the past decades, it has become increasingly important to model and monitor urban growth in mega cities. Although several researchers have proposed models for simulating urban growth, they have been…

Other Computer Science · Computer Science 2018-05-30 Saptarshi Pal , Soumya K Ghosh

Polarization is a ubiquitous phenomenon in social systems. Empirical studies document substantial evidence for opinion polarization across social media, showing a typical bipolarized pattern devising individuals into two groups with…

Physics and Society · Physics 2023-01-19 Jiazhen Liu , Shengda Huang , Nathan Aden , Neil Johnson , Chaoming Song

Autonomous neural systems must efficiently process information in a wide range of novel environments, which may have very different statistical properties. We consider the problem of how to optimally distribute receptors along a…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2017-04-04 Marc W. Howard , Karthik H. Shankar

In this paper we make an attempt to increase our understanding of the urban scaling phenomenon. We investigate how superlinear scaling emerges if a network increases in size and how this scaling depends on the occurrence of elements that…

Physics and Society · Physics 2023-12-06 Anthony F. J. van Raan

Diversified economies are critical for cities to sustain their growth and development, but they are also costly because diversification often requires expanding a city's capability base. We analyze how cities manage this trade-off by…

Physics and Society · Physics 2025-01-20 Simone Daniotti , Matte Hartog , Frank Neffke

Urban theorists, social reformists and philosophers have considered the city as a living organism since Plato. However, despite extraordinary advancements in evolutionary biology, now being used to explain social and cultural phenomena, a…

Defining an objective boundary for a city is a difficult problem, which remains to be solved by an effective method. Recent years, new methods for identifying urban boundary have been developed by means of spatial search techniques (e.g.…

Physics and Society · Physics 2022-09-20 Yanguang Chen , Jiejing Wang , Yuqing Long , Xiaohu Zhang , Xiaoping Liu , Xiaosong Li

The aim of this short paper is to summarize my recent preprint (arXiv:1209.1112), in which I proposed a novel and probably controversial view about cognitive mapping; that is, the image of the city out of the underlying scaling of city…

Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems · Physics 2013-07-17 Bin Jiang

Urban scaling theory posits that urban indicators follow power-law relations with population, yet the evolution of these patterns - and the role of regional differences in settings marked by social inequalities and unplanned urbanization -…

We introduce a predictive algorithm for the smart growth of cities with populations upward of 100,000, allowing for extensive simulations of growth plans and their effects upon an urban populous. A smart growth metric is calculated to…

Physics and Society · Physics 2017-12-01 James Flamino , Alexander Norman , Madison Wyatt

We propose hypotheses describing the empirical finding of an association between the exponents of urban GDP scaling and Zipf's law for cities. These hypotheses represent various combinations of directional or reciprocal causal links between…

Physics and Society · Physics 2021-07-27 Fabiano L. Ribeiro , Jose Lobo , Diego Rybski

High-dimensional limit theorems have been shown useful to derive tuning rules for finding the optimal scaling in random-walk Metropolis algorithms. The assumptions under which weak convergence results are proved are however restrictive: the…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-02-16 Sebastian M Schmon , Philippe Gagnon

Urban systems, as dynamic complex systems, continuously generate spatio-temporal data streams that encode the fundamental laws of human mobility and city evolution. While AI for Science has witnessed the transformative power of foundation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Wei Chen , Yuqian Wu , Junle Chen , Xiaofang Zhou , Yuxuan Liang

\abstract{Urban scaling theories posit that larger cities exhibit disproportionately higher levels of socioeconomic activity and human interactions. Yet, evidence from developing contexts (especially those marked by stark socioeconomic…