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Related papers: Cities as nuclei of sustainability?

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The spatial heterogeneity of cities -- the uneven distribution of population and activities -- is fundamental to urban dynamics and related to critical issues such as infrastructure overload, housing affordability, and social inequality.…

Physics and Society · Physics 2025-11-14 Hao Huang , Yuming Lin , Jiazhen Liu

Since the Industrial Revolution, the world economy has experienced rapid development, and China's economy has also achieved an unprecedented takeoff in the past. Behind the economic growth, population surge, and continuous improvement of…

General Economics · Economics 2025-11-17 Chao Zhang , Yulin Lu

For the first time the systems of cities in seven countries or regions among the largest in the world (China, India, Brazil, Europe, the Former Soviet Union (FSU), the United States and South Africa) are made comparable through the building…

As the African continent continues to urbanise, cities are becoming increasingly central to the transformations of societies and economies. Many studies highlight the limits of urban planning in these cities, emphasising the high share of…

Physics and Society · Physics 2024-05-02 Margherita Fadda

This paper is mainly devoted to lay an empirical foundation for further research on complex spatial dynamics of two-population interaction. Based on the US population census data, a rural and urban population interaction model is developed.…

Physics and Society · Physics 2016-06-14 Yanguang Chen , Feng Xu

The dynamics of urban systems can be understood from an evolutionary perspective, in some sense extending biological and cultural evolution. Models for systems of cities implementing elementary evolutionary processes remain however to be…

Physics and Society · Physics 2020-05-01 Juste Raimbault

The relationships between diversity, productivity and scale determine much of the structure and robustness of complex biological and social systems. While arguments for the link between specialization and productivity are common, diversity…

Physics and Society · Physics 2014-06-24 Luís M. A. Bettencourt , Horacio Samaniego , HyeJin Youn

The nonlinear synergy between global warming and urbanization is amplifying extreme climate risks in cities worldwide. While observations and simulations confirm these compounding effects, two fundamental bottlenecks impede predictive…

Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics · Physics 2026-05-04 Qiuxia Wu , Yaqiang Wang , Huabing Ke

Scaling of geographic space refers to the fact that for a large geographic area its small constituents or units are much more common than the large ones. This paper develops a novel perspective to the scaling of geographic space using large…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2013-08-08 Bin Jiang , Xintao Liu

We study the scaling of (i) numbers of workers and aggregate incomes by occupational categories against city size, and (ii) total incomes against numbers of workers in different occupations, across the functional metropolitan areas of…

Physics and Society · Physics 2019-10-17 Somwrita Sarkar , Elsa Arcaute , Erez Hatna , Tooran Alizadeh , Glen Searle , Michael Batty

Monitoring urban structure and development requires high-quality data at high spatiotemporal resolution. While traditional censuses have provided foundational insights into demographic and socioeconomic aspects of urban life, their pace may…

Physics and Society · Physics 2024-03-20 Gezhi Xiu , Jianying Wang , Thilo Gross , Mei-Po Kwan , Xia Peng , Yu Liu

Fundamental laws of human mobility have been extensively studied, yet we are still lacking a comprehensive understanding of the mobility patterns of sharing conveyances. Since travellers would highly probably no longer possess their own…

Physics and Society · Physics 2022-02-16 Ruiqi Li , Ankang Luo , Fan Shang , Linyuan Lv , Jingfang Fan , Gang Lu , Liming Pan , Lixin Tian , H. Eugene Stanley

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

Cities are living organisms. They are out of equilibrium, open systems that never stop developing and sometimes die. The local geography can be compared to a shell constraining its development. In brief, a city's current layout is a step in…

Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems · Physics 2015-05-20 Thomas Courtat , Catherine Gloaguen , Stephane Douady

Two fundamental issues surrounding research on the image of the city respectively focus on the city's external and internal representations. The external representation in the context of this paper refers to the city itself, external to…

Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems · Physics 2013-10-22 Bin Jiang

We explain the anomaly of election results between large cities and rural areas in terms of urban scaling in the 1948-2016 US elections and in the 2016 EU referendum of the UK. The scaling curves are all universal and depend on a single…

Physics and Society · Physics 2018-07-04 Eszter Bokányi , Zoltán Szállási , Gábor Vattay

The largest 6,529 international corporations are accountable for almost 30% of global CO2e emissions. A growing awareness of the role of the corporate world in the path toward sustainability has led many shareholders and stakeholders to…

General Economics · Economics 2023-07-04 Rossana Mastrandrea , Rob ter Burg , Yuli Shan , Klaus Hubacek , Franco Ruzzenenti

Bike-sharing systems have been regarded as a critical component of solutions towards the transition to greener and more sustainable transportation, with the benefits of reducing carbon emissions, improving public health, and mitigating…

Physics and Society · Physics 2022-05-18 Xinze Qiu , Tianli Gao , Yu Yang , Ankang Luo , Fan Shang , Ruiqi Li

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…

Physics and Society · Physics 2019-03-19 Juste Raimbault , Julien Perret

The relationships between urban area and population size have been empirically demonstrated to follow the scaling law of allometric growth. This allometric scaling is based on exponential growth of city size and can be termed "exponential…

Physics and Society · Physics 2018-12-19 Yanguang Chen