Related papers: Discovering the laws of urbanisation
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…
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…
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…
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…
Human settlements on Earth are scattered in a multitude of shapes, sizes and spatial arrangements. These patterns are often not random but a result of complex geographical, cultural, economic and historical processes that have profound…
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'…
Urbanization has been the dominant demographic trend in the entire world, during the last half century. Rural to urban migration, international migration, and the re-classification or expansion of existing city boundaries have been among…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
Evidences are presented concerning tantalizing regularities in cities' population-flows in what regards to space and time correlations. The former exhibit a distance-behavior (for large distances) compatible with the inverse square law,…
It is very important to understand urban mobility patterns because most trips are concentrated in urban areas. In the paper, a new model is proposed to model collective human mobility in urban areas. The model can be applied to predict…
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.…
The intrinsic factor that drives the human movement remains unclear for decades. While our observations from intra-urban and inter-urban trips both demonstrate a universal law in human mobility. Be specific, the probability from one…
The distribution of the population of cities has attracted a great deal of attention, in part because it sharply constrains models of local growth. However, to this day, there is no consensus on the distribution below the very upper tail,…
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…
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…
The vast majority of travel takes place within cities. Recently, new data has become available which allows for the discovery of urban mobility patterns which differ from established results about long distance travel. Specifically, the…