Related papers: Cities as nuclei of sustainability?
Numerous urban indicators scale with population in a power law across cities, but whether the cross-sectional scaling law is applicable to the temporal growth of individual cities is unclear. Here we first find two paradoxical scaling…
The future of the human race is urban. The world's population is projected to grow an additional 2.5 billion by 2050, with all expected to live in urban areas. This will increase the percentage of urban population from 55% today to 70%…
Understanding cities is central to addressing major global challenges from climate and health to economic resilience. Although increasingly perceived as fundamental socio-economic units, the detailed fabric of urban economic activities is…
The morphology of urban agglomeration is studied here in the context of information exchange between different spatio-temporal scales. Cities are multidimensional non-linear phenomena, so understanding the relationships and connectivity…
This chapter is about Complexity and Spatial Dynamics in Urban Systems. Strong inequalities in the size of cities and the apparent difficulty of limiting their growth raise practical issues for spatial planning. At a time when new…
We study the influence that population density and the road network have on each others' growth and evolution. We use a simple model of formation and evolution of city roads which reproduces the most important empirical features of street…
Greenhouse gases (GHG) trap heat and make the planet warmer, exacerbating global climate change. Energy production is the second largest contributor to climate change [19]. In particular, the production of electricity and use of gas…
Half of the world population resides in cities and urban segregation is becoming a global issue. One of the best known attempts to understand it is the Schelling model, which considers two types of agents that relocate whenever a transfer…
The social cost of carbon (SCC) serves as a concise gauge of climate change's economic impact, often reported at the global and country level. SCC values are disproportionately high for less-developed, populous countries. Assessing the…
Designing socially active streets has long been a goal of urban planning, yet existing quantitative research largely measures pedestrian volume rather than the quality of social interactions. We hypothesize that street view imagery -- an…
Economic growth is conventionally analyzed at the national level, yet cities generate the bulk of global output. Here we construct GDP trajectories for 8,808 functional urban areas (FUAs) across 165 countries over 1993-2019 using…
Quantifying the spatial organization of human settlements is fundamental to understanding the complexity of urban systems. However, the quantitative patterns of the distribution of villages, towns, and cities that lie between random and…
Cities play a pivotal role in human development and sustainability, yet studying them presents significant challenges due to the vast scale and complexity of spatial-temporal data. One such challenge is the need to uncover universal urban…
A city is not a tree but a semi-lattice. To use a perhaps more familiar term, a city is a complex network. The complex network constitutes a unique topological perspective on cities and enables us to better understand the kind of problem a…
In this paper, we apply recent findings from urban scaling theory to evaluate how it could be applied to a one-dimensional archetypal city. Our focus is on how the simplicity of a one-dimensional model can provide intuitive insights that…
Climate change mitigation in urban mobility requires policies reconfiguring urban form to increase accessibility and facilitate low-carbon modes of transport. However, current policy research has insufficiently assessed urban form effects…
Urban development is shaped by historical, geographical, and economic factors, presenting challenges for planners in understanding urban form. This study models commute flows across multiple U.S. cities, uncovering consistent patterns in…
This study develops a statistical model that integrates economic agglomeration theory and power-law distributions of city sizes to project future population distribution on 1-km grid cells. We focus on Japan -- a country at the forefront of…
Despite the rapid growth of cities in the past century, our quantitative, in-depth understanding of how cities grow remains limited due to a consistent lack of historical data. Thus, the scaling laws between a city's features and its…
The distribution of the population of cities has attracted a great deal of attention, in part because it sharply constrains models of local growth. However, to this day, there is no consensus on the distribution below the very upper tail,…