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Related papers: Multilevel comparison of large urban systems

200 papers

Cities are often compared through scaling laws, usually expressed as power-law relations between population size and aggregate urban quantities related to infrastructure, socioeconomic activity, or environmental impacts. These laws are…

Physics and Society · Physics 2026-05-19 Ulysse Marquis , Marc Barthelemy

City size distributions are known to be well approximated by power laws across a wide range of countries. But such distributions are also meaningful at other spatial scales, such as within certain regions of a country. Using data from…

General Economics · Economics 2019-07-30 Tomoya Mori , Tony E. Smith , Wen-Tai Hsu

Traffic networks have been proved to be fractal systems. However, previous studies mainly focused on monofractal networks, while complex systems are of multifractal structure. This paper is devoted to exploring the general regularities of…

Physics and Society · Physics 2022-11-09 Yuqing Long , Yanguang Chen

The share of the world population living in cities with more than one million people rose from 11% in 1975 to 24% in 2025 (our estimates). Will this trend towards greater concentration in large cities continue or level off? We introduce two…

Physics and Society · Physics 2026-03-31 Andrea Musso , Diego Rybski , Dirk Helbing , Frank Neffke

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

Given that a group of cities follows a scaling law connecting urban population with socio-economic or infrastructural metrics (transversal scaling), should we expect that each city would follow the same behavior over time (longitudinal…

Urban systems present hierarchical structures at many different scales. These are observed as administrative regional delimitations which are the outcome of complex geographical, political and historical processes which leave almost…

With the fast-growing economy in the past ten years, cities in China have experience great changes, meanwhile, huge volume of urban grid management data has been recorded. Studies on urban grid management are not common so far. This kind of…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2018-05-23 Yongkun Wang , Yaohui Jin , Bo Fan

Self-organisation in territories leads to the emergence of patterns in urban systems that shape the interactions between cities, resulting in a hierarchical organisation. Governance follows as well a hierarchical structure, breaking the…

Physics and Society · Physics 2023-02-13 Valentina Marin , Carlos Molinero , Elsa Arcaute

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

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'…

Physics and Society · Physics 2022-04-28 Lei Dong , Paolo Santi , Yu Liu , Siqi Zheng , Carlo Ratti

Understanding demographic and migrational patterns constitutes a great challenge. Millions of individual decisions, motivated by economic, political, demographic, rational, and/or emotional reasons underlie the high complexity of…

Physics and Society · Physics 2013-12-09 A. Hernando , R. Hernando , A. Plastino

Understanding how urban systems and traffic dynamics co-evolve is crucial for advancing sustainable and resilient cities. However, their bidirectional causal relationships remain underexplored due to challenges of simultaneously inferring…

Physics and Society · Physics 2025-10-30 Yatao Zhang , Ye Hong , Song Gao , Martin Raubal

A good understanding of cities is crucial to implement urban planning policies leading to social and economic sustainability and an efficient use of resources. While urban concentration has been associated with both positive and negative…

Physics and Society · Physics 2025-09-09 Gaëtan Laziou , Rémi Lemoy

The scaling relations between city attributes and population are emergent and ubiquitous aspects of urban growth. Quantifying these relations and understanding their theoretical foundation, however, is difficult due to the challenge of…

Physics and Society · Physics 2023-01-31 Keith Burghardt , Johannes H. Uhl , Kristina Lerman , Stefan Leyk

Urban land growth presents a major sustainability challenge, yet its growth patterns and dynamics remain unclear. We quantified urban land evolution by analyzing its statistical distribution in 14 regions and countries over 29 years. The…

This paper propose the concept of big model as a novel research paradigm for regional and urban studies. Big models are fine-scale regional/urban simulation models for a large geographical area, and they overcome the trade-off between…

Other Computer Science · Computer Science 2014-06-26 Ying Long , Kang Wu , Jianghao Wang , Zhenjiang Shen

During the last years, the new science of municipalities has been established as a fertile quantitative approach to systematically understand the urban phenomena. One of its main pillars is the proposition that urban systems display…

Ignoring the differences between countries, human reproductive and dispersal behaviors can be described by some standardized models, so whether there is a universal law of population growth hidden in the abundant and unstructured data from…

Physics and Society · Physics 2024-02-08 Jiajun Ma , Qinghua Chen , Xiaosong Chen , Jingfang Fan , Xiaomeng Li , Yi Shi

We investigate into the rank-size distributions of urban agglomerations for India between 1981 to 2011. The incidence of a power law tail is prominent. A relevant question persists regarding the evolution of the power tail coefficient. We…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-06-04 Kausik Gangopadhyay , Banasri Basu