Related papers: Multilevel comparison of large urban systems
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…
A city (or an urban cluster) is not an isolated spatial unit, but a combination of areas with closely linked socio-economic activities. However, so far, we lack a consistent and quantitative approach to define multi-level urban clusters…
The science of cities seeks to understand and explain regularities observed in the world's major urban systems. Modelling the population evolution of cities is at the core of this science and of all urban studies. Quantitatively, the most…
In this article, the relationship between two well-accepted empirical propositions regarding the distribution of population in cities, namely, Gibrat's law and Zipf's law, are rigorously examined using the Chinese census data. Our findings…
Over the last decades, in disciplines as diverse as economics, geography, and complex systems, a perspective has arisen proposing that many properties of cities are quantitatively predictable due to agglomeration or scaling effects. Using…
Analysis of the urban population fraction data for sixteen populous countries over the last fifty years reveals a universal increase in urbanization, exhibiting four qualitatively distinct temporal patterns: (i) continuously accelerating…
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…
The shape of urban settlements plays a fundamental role in their sustainable planning. Properly defining the boundaries of cities is challenging and remains an open problem in the Science of Cities. Here, we propose a worldwide model to…
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…
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…
Understanding the morphology of an urban system is an important step toward unveiling the dynamical processes of its growth and development. At the foundation of every urban system, transportation system is undeniably a crucial component in…
Universality in the behavior of complex systems often reveals itself in the form of scale-invariant distributions that are essentially independent of the details of the microscopic dynamics. A representative paradigm of complex behavior in…
Is there a general economic pathway recapitulated by individual cities over and over? Identifying such evolution structure, if any, would inform models for the assessment, maintenance, and forecasting of urban sustainability and economic…
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…
Zipf's law can be used to describe the rank-size distribution of cities in a region. It was seldom employed to research urban internal structure. In this paper, we demonstrate that the space-filling process within a city follows Zipf's law…
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…
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…
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…
Systems of cities at the macroscopic scale have their trajectories conditioned by the evolution of infrastructure networks. This leads to complex planning and management situations in the particular case of international transportation…
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…