Related papers: Modeling the polycentric transition of cities
The amount of data that is being gathered about cities is increasing in size and specificity. However, despite this wealth of information, we still have little understanding of what really drives the processes behind urbanisation. In this…
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 polycentric city model has gained popularity in spatial planning policy, since it is believed to overcome some of the problems often present in monocentric metropolises, ranging from congestion to difficult accessibility to jobs and…
During the last decades, the study of cities has been transformed by new approaches combining engineering and complexity sciences. Network theory is playing a central role, facilitating the quantitative analysis of crucial urban dynamics,…
The spatial arrangement of urban hubs and centers and how individuals interact with these centers is a crucial problem with many applications ranging from urban planning to epidemiology. We utilize here in an unprecedented manner the large…
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.…
The quantitative study of traffic dynamics is crucial to ensure the efficiency of urban transportation networks. The current work investigates the spatial properties of congestion, that is, we aim to characterize the city areas where…
Understanding how cities transition from free-flowing to congested traffic remains a central open problem in urban science. Here we show that city-scale congestion undergoes a reproducible nonlinear transition analogous to an order-disorder…
Entropy relates the fast, microscopic behaviour of the elements in a system to its slow, macroscopic state. We propose to use it to explain how, as complexity theory suggests, small scale decisions of individuals form cities. For this, we…
The congestion formation on a urban road network is one of the key issue for the development of a sustainable mobility in the future smart cities. In this work we propose a reductionist approach studying the stationary states of a simple…
Traffic congestion is one of the most notable problems arising in worldwide urban areas, importantly compromising human mobility and air quality. Current technologies to sense real-time data about cities, and its open distribution for…
Growing evidence suggests that the macroscopic functional states of urban road networks exhibit multistability and hysteresis, but microscopic mechanisms underlying these phenomena remain elusive. Here, we demonstrate that in real-world…
The increasing urbanization process we have been witnessing in the last decades is accompanied by a significant increase in traffic congestion in cities around the world. The effect of the congestion is represented in the enormous time…
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…
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…
Most cities in the US and in the world were organized around car traffic. In particular, large structures such as urban freeways or ring roads were built for reducing car traffic congestion. With the evolution of public transportation,…
Commuting is a key mechanism that governs the dynamics of cities. Despite its importance, very little is known of the properties and mechanisms underlying this crucial urban process. Here, we capitalize on $\sim$ 50 million individuals'…
The spatial structure of modern cities exhibits highly diverse patterns and keeps evolving under numerous constraints. Two key dimensions have recently achieved prominence in characterizing this diversity: heterogeneity and spreading.…
It is understood that congestion in traffic can be interpreted in terms of the instability of the equation of dynamic motion. The evolution of a traffic system from an unstable or metastable state to a globally stable state bears a strong…
Do cities have just one or several centers? Studies performing radial or monocentric analyses of cities are usually criticised by researchers stating that cities are actually polycentric, and this has been well known for a long time.…