Related papers: The scaling structure of the global road network
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…
Spatial networks of land cover are well-described by power law rank-size distributions. Continuous field proxies for human settlements, agriculture and forest cover have similar spatial scaling properties spanning 4 to 5 orders of…
Despite the rapid growth of cities in the past century, our quantitative, in-depth understanding of how cities grow remains limited due to a consistent lack of historical data. Thus, the scaling laws between a city's features and its…
The scaling relations between city attributes and population are emergent and ubiquitous aspects of urban growth. Quantifying these relations and understanding their theoretical foundation, however, is difficult due to the challenge of…
Human mobility is a fundamental process underpinning socioeconomic life and urban structure. Classic theories, such as egocentric activity spaces and central place theory, provide crucial insights into specific facets of movement, like…
Understanding the dynamics of road networks has theoretical implications for urban science and practical applications for sustainable long-term planning. Various generative models to explain road network growth have been introduced in the…
Scaling of geographic space refers to the fact that for a large geographic area its small constituents or units are much more common than the large ones. This paper develops a novel perspective to the scaling of geographic space using large…
Road networks represent a key component of human settlements, such as cities, towns, and villages, that mediate pollution and congestion, as well as economic development. However, little is known about the long-term development trajectories…
How does the shape of a network change as its size increases? Although random graph models provide some expectations for such "scaling behaviors" in the structure of networks, relatively little is known about how empirical network structure…
Subway systems span most large cities, and railway networks most countries in the world. These networks are fundamental in the development of countries and their cities, and it is therefore crucial to understand their formation and…
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…
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…
Considering agricultural landscapes as networks can provide information about spatial connectivity relevant for a wide range of applications including pollination, pest management, and ecology. Global agricultural networks are…
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…
The urban road networks of the 20 largest German cities have been analysed, based on a detailed database providing the geographical positions as well as the travel-times for network sizes up to 37,000 nodes and 87,000 links. As the human…
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…
We investigate the behavior of extended urban traffic networks within the framework of percolation theory by using real and synthetic traffic data. Our main focus shifts from the statistical properties of the cluster size distribution…
Geometric constraints impact the formation of a broad range of spatial networks, from amino acid chains folding to proteins structures to rearranging particle aggregates. How the network of interactions dynamically self-organizes in such…
We found that models of evolving random networks exhibit dynamic scaling similar to scaling of growing surfaces. It is demonstrated by numerical simulations of two variants of the model in which nodes are added as well as removed [Phys.…
Scaling has been proposed as a powerful tool to analyze the properties of complex systems, and in particular for cities where it describes how various properties change with population. The empirical study of scaling on a wide range of…