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Related papers: Great cities look small

200 papers

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

The interaction of all mobile species with their environment hinges on their movement patterns: the places they visit and how frequently they go there. In human society, where the prevalent form of cohabitation is in cities, the highly…

Physics and Society · Physics 2020-02-17 Markus Schläpfer , Michael Szell , Hadrien Salat , Carlo Ratti , Geoffrey B. West

The coupling between population growth and transport accessibility has been an elusive problem for more than 60 years now. Due to the lack of theoretical foundations, most of the studies that considered how the evolution of transportation…

Physics and Society · Physics 2019-12-02 Valerio Volpati , Marc Barthelemy

We describe a simple spatial model of urban growth for systems of cities at the macroscopic scale, which combines direct interaction between cities and an indirect effect of physical network flows as population growth drivers. The model is…

Physics and Society · Physics 2018-04-26 Juste Raimbault

Geographic borders are not only essential for the effective functioning of government, the distribution of administrative responsibilities and the allocation of public resources, they also influence the interregional flow of information,…

Physics and Society · Physics 2011-03-30 C. Thiemann , F. Theis , D. Grady , R. Brune , D. Brockmann

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…

Physics and Society · Physics 2026-04-01 Rafael Prieto-Curiel

Motivated by empirical evidence on the interplay between geography, population density and societal interaction, we propose a generative process for the evolution of social structure in cities. Our analytical and simulation results predict…

Physics and Society · Physics 2013-06-12 Wei Pan , Gourab Ghoshal , Coco Krumme , Manuel Cebrian , Alex Pentland

There is strong expectation that cities, across time, culture and level of development, share much in common in terms of their form and function. Recently, attempts to formalize mathematically these expectations have led to the hypothesis…

Physics and Society · Physics 2013-01-28 Luis M. A. Bettencourt , Jose Lobo , Hyejin Youn

Barriers in cities, such as administrative boundaries, natural obstacles, railways or major roads are thought to induce segregation. However, the empirical knowledge about this phenomenon is limited. Here, we present a network science…

Physics and Society · Physics 2025-08-13 Gergő Pintér , Balázs Lengyel

Urban morphology and socioeconomic aspects of cities have been explored by analysing urban street network. To analyse the network, several variations of the centrality indices are often used. However, its nature has not yet been widely…

Physics and Society · Physics 2021-03-23 Kaoru Yamaoka , Yusuke Kumakoshi , Yuji Yoshimura

Understanding of the mechanisms driving our daily face-to-face encounters is still limited; the field lacks large-scale datasets describing both individual behaviors and their collective interactions. However, here, with the help of travel…

Physics and Society · Physics 2013-08-07 Lijun Sun , Kay W. Axhausen , Der-Horng Lee , Xianfeng Huang

Understanding human mobility is essential for applications ranging from urban planning to public health. Traditional mobility models such as flow networks and colocation matrices capture only pairwise interactions between discrete…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Prathyush Sambaturu , Bernardo Gutierrez , Moritz U. G. Kraemer

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…

Physics and Society · Physics 2021-01-26 Lei Dong , Zhou Huang , Jiang Zhang , Yu Liu

Given the rapid recent trend of urbanization, a better understanding of how urban infrastructure mediates socioeconomic interactions and economic systems is of vital importance. While the accessibility of location-enabled devices as well as…

Inter-city interactions are critical for the transmission of infectious diseases, yet their effects on the scaling of disease cases remain largely underexplored. Here, we use the commuting network as a proxy for inter-city interactions,…

Physics and Society · Physics 2025-01-06 Nathalia A. Loureiro , Camilo R. Neto , Jack Sutton , Matjaz Perc , Haroldo V. Ribeiro

We propose a bare-bones stochastic model that takes into account both the geographical distribution of people within a country and their complex network of connections. The model, which is designed to give rise to a scale-free network of…

Physics and Society · Physics 2014-02-04 Gerald F. Frasco , Jie Sun , Hernan D. Rozenfeld , Daniel ben-Avraham

The growth of transportation networks and their increasing interconnections, although positive, has the downside effect of an increasing complexity which make them difficult to use, to assess, and limits their efficiency. On average in the…

Physics and Society · Physics 2014-11-06 Riccardo Gallotti , Marc Barthelemy

Cities are characterized by concentrating population, economic activity and services. However, not all cities are equal and a natural hierarchy at local, regional or global scales spontaneously emerges. In this work, we introduce a method…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-07-24 Maxime Lenormand , Bruno Gonçalves , Antònia Tugores , José J. Ramasco

Bikesharing schemes are transportation systems that not only provide an efficient mode of transportation in congested urban areas, but also improve last-mile connectivity with public transportation and local accessibility. Bikesharing…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2019-06-06 Fernando Munoz-Mendez , Konstantin Klemmer , Ke Han , Stephen Jarvis

Cities are systems with a large number of constituents and agents interacting with each other and can be considered as emblematic of complex systems. Modeling these systems is a real challenge and triggered the interest of many disciplines…

Physics and Society · Physics 2019-10-23 Marc Barthelemy