Related papers: Cities as nuclei of sustainability?
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…
We investigated the socioeconomic scaling behavior of all cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants in the Netherlands and found significant superlinear scaling of gross urban product with population size. Of these cities, 22 major cities…
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 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…
We consider the scaling laws, second-order statistics and entropy of the consumed energy of metropolis cities which are hybrid complex systems comprising social networks, engineering systems, agricultural output, economic activity and…
The share of the world population living in cities with more than one million people rose from 11% in 1975 to 24% in 2025 (our estimates). Will this trend towards greater concentration in large cities continue or level off? We introduce two…
Many outputs of cities scale in universal ways, including infrastructure, crime, and economic activity. Through a mathematical model, this study investigates the interplay between such scaling laws in human organization and governmental…
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…
This study estimates the relationships between street network characteristics and transport-sector CO2 emissions across every urban area in the world and investigates whether they are the same across development levels and urban design…
Urban scaling and Zipf's law are two fundamental paradigms for the science of cities. These laws have mostly been investigated independently and are often perceived as disassociated matters. Here we present a large scale investigation about…
The urban transition, the increased ratio of urban to rural population globally and within countries, is a hallmark of the 21st century. Our analysis of publicly available data from the World Bank spanning several decades for ~195 countries…
Global sustainability relies on our capacity of understanding and guiding urban systems, and their metabolism, in an adequate way. It has been proposed that bigger and denser cities are more resource-efficient than smaller ones because they…
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…
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…
This paper attempts to create a first comprehensive analysis of the integrated characteristics of contemporary Indian cities, using scaling and geographic analysis over a set of diverse indicators. We use data at the level of Urban…
More than a half of world population is now living in cities and this number is expected to be two-thirds by 2050. Fostered by the relevancy of a scientific characterization of cities and for the availability of an unprecedented amount of…
In the quest for more environmentally sustainable urban areas, the concept of the 15-minute city has been proposed to encourage active mobility, primarily through walking and cycling. An urban area is considered a ``15-minute city" if every…
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…
Cities are characterized by the presence of a dense population with a high potential for interactions between individuals of diverse backgrounds. They appear in parallel to the Neolithic revolution a few millennia ago. The advantages…
Scaling laws are powerful summaries of the variations of urban attributes with city size. However, the validity of their universal meaning for cities is hampered by the observation that different scaling regimes can be encountered for the…