Related papers: Large cities are less green

Human settlements on Earth are scattered in a multitude of shapes, sizes and spatial arrangements. These patterns are often not random but a result of complex geographical, cultural, economic and historical processes that have profound…

This paper provides a new geospatial perspective on whether or not Zipf's law holds for all cities or for the largest cities in the United States using a massive dataset and its computing. A major problem around this issue is how to define…

Understanding scaling relations of social and environmental attributes of urban systems is necessary for effectively managing cities. Urban scaling theory (UST) has assumed that population density scales positively with city size. We…

The use of cars in cities has many negative impacts on its population, including pollution, noise and the use of space. Yet, detecting factors that reduce automobile dependency is a serious challenge, particularly across different regions.…

While informal settlements lack focused development and are highly dynamic, the quality of spatial data for these places may be uncertain. This study evaluates the quality and biases of AI-generated Open Building Datasets (OBDs) generated…

Since the industrial revolution, accelerated urban growth has overflown administrative divisions, merged cities into large built extensions, and blurred the boundaries between urban and rural land-uses. These traits, present in most of…

Anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions exhibit spatial variation owing to differences in development patterns, local climate, economic composition, energy sources, and other factors. Many of these factors - and therefore their…

Cities are physical manifestations of our competitive and cooperative behaviours. The tension between these two forces generates dynamic equilibriums whose material expressions are cities and their evolutions. In a Darwinian cooperative…

The current science of cities can provide a useful foundation for future urban policies, provided that these proposals have been validated by correct observations of the diversity of situations in the world. However, international…

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…

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…

The 15-minute city concept, which advocates for cities where essential services are accessible within a 15-minute walk or bike ride, has gained significant attention in recent years. However, despite being celebrated for promoting…

There are many benefits and costs that come from people and firms clustering together in space. Agglomeration economies, in particular, are the manifestation of centripetal forces that make larger cities disproportionately more wealthy than…

Empirical evidence suggest that most urban systems experience a transition from a monocentric to a polycentric organisation as they grow and expand. We propose here a stochastic, out-of-equilibrium model of the city which explains the…

Superlinear scaling in cities, which appears in sociological quantities such as economic productivity and creative output relative to urban population size, has been observed but not been given a satisfactory theoretical explanation. Here…

Many large cities are found at locations with certain first nature advantages. Yet, those exogenous locational features may not be the most potent forces governing the spatial pattern of cities. In particular, population size, spacing and…

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…

Traffic congestion is a major problem in megacities which increases vehicle emissions and degrades ambient air quality. Various models have been developed to address the universal features of traffic jams. These models range from micro…

In the present work we study the relationship between population allocation and the combined effects of urban size and energy consumption, for two given areas and through a major part of the twentieth century. Along these lines a general…

Seen from a satellite, observing land use in the daytime or at night, most cities have circular shapes, organised around a city centre. A radial analysis of artificial land use growth is conducted in order to understand what the recent…