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Understanding the morphology of an urban system is an important step toward unveiling the dynamical processes of its growth and development. At the foundation of every urban system, transportation system is undeniably a crucial component in…

Physics and Society · Physics 2019-04-23 Hoai Nguyen Huynh , Evgeny Makarov , Erika Fille Legara , Christopher Monterola , Lock Yue Chew

The minimization of Fisher's information (MFI) approach of Frieden et al. [Phys. Rev. E {\bf 60} 48 (1999)] is applied to the study of size distributions in social groups on the basis of a recently established analogy between scale…

Physics and Society · Physics 2009-09-16 A. Hernando , D. Villuendas , C. Vesperinas , M. Abad , A. Plastino

We propose a bare-bones stochastic model that takes into account both the geographical distribution of people within a country and their complex network of connections. The model, which is designed to give rise to a scale-free network of…

Physics and Society · Physics 2014-02-04 Gerald F. Frasco , Jie Sun , Hernan D. Rozenfeld , Daniel ben-Avraham

For decades, urban development was studied on two-dimensional maps, largely ignoring the third dimension. However, building height is crucial because it dramatically potentiates the interior space of cities. Here, using a newly released…

Physics and Society · Physics 2025-08-29 Peiran Zhang , Liang Gao , Fabiano L. Ribeiro , Bin Jia , Ziyou Gao , Diego Rybski

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…

In 2012 the world's population exceeded 7 billion, and since 2008 the number of individuals living in urban areas has surpassed that of rural areas. This is the result of an overall increase of life expectancy in many countries that has…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-12-14 Filippo Simini , Charlotte James

City size distributions are known to be well approximated by power laws across a wide range of countries. But such distributions are also meaningful at other spatial scales, such as within certain regions of a country. Using data from…

General Economics · Economics 2019-07-30 Tomoya Mori , Tony E. Smith , Wen-Tai Hsu

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…

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…

Physics and Society · Physics 2026-03-31 Andrea Musso , Diego Rybski , Dirk Helbing , Frank Neffke

The time evolution of Earth with her cities, languages and countries is considered in terms of the multiplicative noise and the fragmentation- processes, where the related families, size distributions, lifetimes, bilinguals, etc. are…

Physics and Society · Physics 2009-11-13 Caglar Tuncay

Zipf's law of city-size distributions can be expressed by three types of mathematical models: one-parameter form, two-parameter form, and three-parameter form. The one-parameter and one of the two-parameter models are familiar to urban…

Physics and Society · Physics 2018-12-19 Yanguang Chen

We study a new parametric family of distributions on the ordered simplex $\nabla^{d-1} = \{y \in \mathbb{R}^d: y_1 \geq \dots \geq y_d \geq 0, \sum_{k=1}^d y_k = 1\}$, which we call Generalized Rank Dirichlet (GRD) distributions. Their…

Probability · Mathematics 2023-10-25 David Itkin

The amount of data that is being gathered about cities is increasing in size and specificity. However, despite this wealth of information, we still have little understanding of what really drives the processes behind urbanisation. In this…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-11-30 Rémi Louf

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…

Despite the long history of modelling human mobility, we continue to lack a highly accurate approach with low data requirements for predicting mobility patterns in cities. Here, we present a population-weighted opportunities model without…

Physics and Society · Physics 2017-10-03 Xiao-Yong Yan , Chen Zhao , Ying Fan , Zengru Di , Wen-Xu Wang

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

The distribution function of particles over clusters is proposed for a system of identical intersecting spheres, the centres of which are uniformly distributed in space. Consideration is based on the concept of the rank number of clusters,…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2023-02-01 Murat Kh. Khokonov , Azamat Kh. Khokonov

Quantifying the spatial organization of human settlements is fundamental to understanding the complexity of urban systems. However, the quantitative patterns of the distribution of villages, towns, and cities that lie between random and…

Physics and Society · Physics 2023-07-06 Lei Dong

In the present work we study the relationship between population allocation and the combined effects of urban size and energy consumption, for two given areas and through a major part of the twentieth century. Along these lines a general…

Physics and Society · Physics 2016-06-17 Josep M Casas-Busquet , Agustí Poch-Parés

We report about universality of rank-integration distributions of open spaces in city space syntax similar to the famous rank-size distributions of cities (Zipf's law). We also demonstrate that the degree of choice an open space represents…

Physics and Society · Physics 2009-11-13 D. Volchenkov , Ph. Blanchard