Related papers: Exploring the relationship between urbanization an…
Investigations of a possible connection between population density and the propagation and magnitude of epidemics have so far led to mixed and unconvincing results. There are three reasons for that. (i) Previous studies did not focus on the…
The Hoover index H, derived from the distribution of population density, has a long history in population geography. But it is prone to misinterpretation and serious measurement artifacts, some of which have been recognized for years. Here…
In this work we characterize sudden increases in the land price of certain urban areas, a phenomenon causing gentrification, via an extended Schelling model. An initial price rise forces some of the disadvantaged inhabitants out of the…
Every now and then the cultural paradigm of a society changes. Human history can be regarded as a sequence of long periods of cultural stasis punctuated by paradigm shifts that transform culture upside-down over the turn of a few…
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…
Social and political polarization is a significant source of conflict and poor governance in many societies. Thus, understanding its causes has become a priority of scholars across many disciplines. Here we demonstrate that shifts in…
Sedentism was a decisive moment in the history of humankind. In a review article Kay and Kaplan quantified land use for early human settlements and found that sedentism and the emergence of farming go hand in hand. For these settlements two…
Socioeconomic segregation is considered one of the main factors behind the emergence of large-scale inequalities in urban areas, and its characterisation is an active area of research in urban studies. There are currently many available…
Challenges due to the rapid urbanization of the world -- especially in emerging countries -- range from an increasing dependence on energy, to air pollution, socio-spatial inequalities, environmental and sustainability issues. Modelling the…
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…
The quest for a theory of cities that could offer a quantitative and systematic approach to manage cities is at the top priority, given the challenges humanity faces due to the increasing urbanization and densification of cities. If such a…
Environmental changes greatly influence the evolution of populations. Here, we study the dynamics of a population of two strains, one growing slightly faster than the other, competing for resources in a time-varying binary environment…
India's urbanization is often characterized as particularly challenging and very unequal but systematic empirical analyses, comparable to other nations, have largely been lacking. Here, we characterize India's economic and human development…
In this paper, we inspect well-known population genetics and social dynamics models. In these models, interacting individuals, while participating in a self-organizing process, give rise to the emergence of complex behaviors and patterns.…
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…
We present a stochastic two-population model that describes the migration and growth of semi-sedentary foragers and sedentary farmers along a river valley during the Neolithic transition. The main idea of this paper is that random migration…
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 phenomenon of gentrification of an urban area is characterized by the displacement of lower-income residents due to rising living costs and an influx of wealthier individuals. This study presents an agent-based model that simulates…
The process of urbanization is one of the most important phenomenon of our societies and it is only recently that the availability of massive amounts of geolocalized historical data allows us to address quantitatively some of its features.…
Human population is at the centre of research on global environmental change. On the one hand, population dynamics influence the environment and the global climate system through consumption-based carbon emissions. On the other hand, health…