English
Related papers

Related papers: The scaling of income inequality in cities

200 papers

Urban scaling analysis, the study of how aggregated urban features vary with the population of an urban area, provides a promising framework for discovering commonalities across cities and uncovering dynamics shared by cities across time…

We study the scaling of (i) numbers of workers and aggregate incomes by occupational categories against city size, and (ii) total incomes against numbers of workers in different occupations, across the functional metropolitan areas of…

Physics and Society · Physics 2019-10-17 Somwrita Sarkar , Elsa Arcaute , Erez Hatna , Tooran Alizadeh , Glen Searle , Michael Batty

A longstanding puzzle in urban science is whether there's an intrinsic match between human populations and the mass of their built environments. Previous findings have revealed various urban properties scaling nonlinearly with population,…

Physics and Society · Physics 2025-08-11 Kangning Huang , Mingzhen Lu

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…

Applications · Statistics 2015-03-19 Cosma Rohilla Shalizi

According to the theory of urban scaling, urban indicators scale with city size in a predictable fashion. In particular, indicators of social and economic productivity are expected to have a superlinear relation. This behavior was verified…

Physics and Society · Physics 2017-03-29 Erez Hatna

Many outputs of cities scale in universal ways, including infrastructure, crime, and economic activity. Through a mathematical model, this study investigates the interplay between such scaling laws in human organization and governmental…

Physics and Society · Physics 2025-06-05 Bryce Morsky

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

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…

Physics and Society · Physics 2009-11-13 Samuel Arbesman , Jon M. Kleinberg , Steven H. Strogatz

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

The spatial distribution of income shapes the structure and organisation of cities and its understanding has broad societal implications. Despite an abundant literature, many issues remain unclear. In particular, all definitions of…

Physics and Society · Physics 2016-06-22 Rémi Louf , Marc Barthelemy

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

We analyse the income distributions of cities in France and the scaling of the income of different deciles as a function of the population. We find a significant difference in the scaling exponents for the richer and poorer parts of the…

Physics and Society · Physics 2023-06-06 Nirbhay Patil , Jean-Pierre Nadal , Jean-Philippe Bouchaud

We undertake an exploration of the economic income (Gross Domestic Product, GDP) of Indian districts and cities based on scaling analyses of the dependence of these quantities on associated population size. Scaling analysis provides a…

Physics and Society · Physics 2020-03-25 Anand Sahasranaman , Luis M. A. Bettencourt

Recent advances in the urban science make broad use of the notion of scaling. We focus here on the important scaling relationship between the gross metropolitan product (GMP) of a city and its population (pop). It has been demonstrated that…

Physics and Society · Physics 2016-09-28 Emanuele Strano , Vishal Sood

The size of cities is known to play a fundamental role in social and economic life. Yet, its relation to the structure of the underlying network of human interactions has not been investigated empirically in detail. In this paper, we map…

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…

Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems · Physics 2015-06-12 Anthony F. J. van Raan

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 prevalence of many urban phenomena changes systematically with population size. We propose a theory that unifies models of economic complexity and cultural evolution to derive urban scaling. The theory accounts for the difference in…

Physics and Society · Physics 2016-12-28 Andres Gomez-Lievano , Oscar Patterson-Lomba , Ricardo Hausmann

Using a geographical scale-free network to describe relations between people in a city, we explain both superlinear and sublinear allometric scaling of urban indicators that quantify activities or performances of the city. The urban…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-06-18 K. Yakubo , S. Saijo , D. Korošak

Cities are characterized by the coexistence of general aggregate patterns, along with many local variations. This poses challenges for analyses of urban phenomena, which tend to be either too aggregated or too local, depending on the…

Physics and Society · Physics 2025-09-30 Luís M. A. Bettencourt , Ivanna Rodriguez , Jordan T. Kemp , José Lobo
‹ Prev 1 2 3 10 Next ›