Related papers: Cities as nuclei of sustainability?
Combining global gridded population and fossil fuel based CO2 emission data at 1km scale, we investigate the spatial origin of CO2 emissions in relation to the population distribution within countries. We depict the correlations between…
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…
The recent availability of data for cities has allowed scientists to exhibit scalings which present themselves in the form of a power-law dependence with population of various socio-economical and structural indicators. We propose here a…
The question of whether urbanization contributes to increasing carbon dioxide emissions has been mainly investigated via scaling relationships with population or population density. However, these approaches overlook the correlations…
Understanding scaling relations of social and environmental attributes of urban systems is necessary for effectively managing cities. Urban scaling theory (UST) has assumed that population density scales positively with city size. We…
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…
Urban scaling laws relate socio-economic, behavioral, and physical variables to the population size of cities and allow for a new paradigm of city planning, and an understanding of urban resilience and economies. Independently of culture…
A longstanding puzzle in urban science is whether there's an intrinsic match between human populations and the mass of their built environments. Previous findings have revealed various urban properties scaling nonlinearly with population,…
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…
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…
Scaling has been proposed as a powerful tool to analyze the properties of complex systems, and in particular for cities where it describes how various properties change with population. The empirical study of scaling on a wide range of…
Cities are often compared through scaling laws, usually expressed as power-law relations between population size and aggregate urban quantities related to infrastructure, socioeconomic activity, or environmental impacts. These laws are…
Cities are some of the most intricate and advanced creations of humanity. Most objects in cities are perfectly synchronised to coordinate activities such as jobs, education, transportation, entertainment, and waste management. Although each…
We study the connection between urban scaling, fundamental allometry (between city population and city area), and per capita vs.\ population density scaling. From simple analytical derivations we obtain the relation between the 3 involved…
There is strong expectation that cities, across time, culture and level of development, share much in common in terms of their form and function. Recently, attempts to formalize mathematically these expectations have led to the hypothesis…
Cities can be characterised and modelled through different urban measures. Consistency within these observables is crucial in order to advance towards a science of cities. Bettencourt et al have proposed that many of these urban measures…
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…
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…
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…
The rank-size distribution of cities follows Zipf's law, and the Zipf scaling exponent often tends to a constant 1. This seems to be a general rule. However, a recent numerical experiment shows that there exists a contradiction between the…