Related papers: Large cities are less green
Urban areas play an unprecedented role in potentially mitigating climate change and supporting sustainable development. In light of the rapid urbanisation in many parts on the globe, it is crucial to understand the relationship between…
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…
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…
Recent studies of urban scaling show that important socioeconomic city characteristics such as wealth and innovation capacity exhibit a nonlinear, particularly a power law scaling with population size. These nonlinear effects are common to…
Rapid urban population growth drives car travel demand, increasing transport carbon emissions and posing a critical challenge to sustainable development. Although existing studies have demonstrated that eco-routing can reduce individual…
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…
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,…
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 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…
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…
Human development has far-reaching impacts on the surface of the globe. The transformation of natural land cover occurs in different forms and urban growth is one of the most eminent transformative processes. We analyze global land cover…
Urbanization promotes economy, mobility, access and availability of resources, but on the other hand, generates higher levels of pollution, violence, crime, and mental distress. The health consequences of the agglomeration of people living…
In several recent publications, Bettencourt, West and collaborators claim that properties of cities such as gross economic production, personal income, numbers of patents filed, number of crimes committed, etc., show super-linear…
Understanding quantitative relationships between urban elements is crucial for a wide range of applications. The observation at the macroscopic level demonstrates that the aggregated urban quantities (e.g., gross domestic product) scale…
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…
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…
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…
Urban morphology has presented significant intellectual challenges to mathematicians and physicists ever since the eighteenth century, when Euler first explored the famous Konigsberg bridges problem. Many important regularities and scaling…
Given the importance of urban sustainability and resilience to the future of our planet, there is a need to better understand the interconnectedness between the social, economic, environmental, and governance outcomes that underline these…
We introduce a model in which city populations grow at rates proportional to the area of their "sphere of influence", where the influence of a city depends on its population (to power \alpha) and distance from city (to power -\beta) and…