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Cities are typical dynamic complex systems that connect people and facilitate interactions. Revealing universal collective patterns behind spatio-temporal interactions between residents is crucial for various urban studies, of which we are…

Being able to assess the impact of government-led investment onto socio-economic indicators in cities has long been an important target of urban planning. However, due to the lack of large-scale data with a fine spatio-temporal resolution,…

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…

The growth of cities has traditionally been studied from a population perspective, while urban expansion-its spatial growth-has often been approached qualitatively. However, characterizing and modeling this spatial expansion is crucial,…

For the first time the systems of cities in seven countries or regions among the largest in the world (China, India, Brazil, Europe, the Former Soviet Union (FSU), the United States and South Africa) are made comparable through the building…

One perspective to view the economic development of cities is through the presence of multinational firms; how subsidiaries of various organizations are set up throughout the globe and how cities are connected to each other through these…

Crime has been previously explained by social characteristics of the residential population and, as stipulated by crime pattern theory, might also be linked to human movements of non-residential visitors. Yet a full empirical validation of…

Computer vision methods that quantify the perception of urban environment are increasingly being used to study the relationship between a city's physical appearance and the behavior and health of its residents. Yet, the throughput of…

In the past decade, cities have experienced rapid growth, expansion, and changes in their community structure. Many aspects of critical urban infrastructure are closely coupled with the human communities that they serve. Urban communities…

Urban areas serve as melting pots of people with diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, who may not only be segregated but have characteristic mobility patterns in the city. While mobility is driven by individual needs and preferences, the…

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…

As urban critic Jane Jacobs conceived, a city is essentially the problem of organized complexity. What underlies the complexity refers to a structural factor, called living structure, which is defined as a mathematical structure composed of…

We introduce a model in which city populations grow at rates proportional to the area of their "sphere of influence", where the influence of a city depends on its population (to power \alpha) and distance from city (to power -\beta) and…

Economic growth is conventionally analyzed at the national level, yet cities generate the bulk of global output. Here we construct GDP trajectories for 8,808 functional urban areas (FUAs) across 165 countries over 1993-2019 using…

Economic activities favor mutual geographical proximity and concentrate spatially to form cities. In a world of diminishing transport costs, however, the advantage of physical proximity is fading, and the role of cities in the economy may…

For urban governments, introducing policies has long been adopted as a main approach to instigate regeneration processes, and to promote social mixing and vitality within the city. However, due to the absence of large fine-grained datasets,…

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…

While great emphasis has been placed on the role of social interactions as driver of innovation growth, very few empirical studies have explicitly investigated the impact of social network structures on the innovation performance of cities.…

Increasing evidence suggests that cities are complex systems, with structural and dynamical features responsible for a broad spectrum of emerging phenomena. Here we use a unique data set of human flows and couple it with information on the…

We analyze the congestion data collected by a GPS device company (TomTom) for almost 300 urban areas in the world. Using simple scaling arguments and data fitting we show that congestion during peak hours in large cities grows essentially…