Related papers: A common trajectory recapitulated by urban economi…
Understanding cities is central to addressing major global challenges from climate and health to economic resilience. Although increasingly perceived as fundamental socio-economic units, the detailed fabric of urban economic activities is…
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…
The current science of cities can provide a useful foundation for future urban policies, provided that these proposals have been validated by correct observations of the diversity of situations in the world. However, international…
Diversified economies are critical for cities to sustain their growth and development, but they are also costly because diversification often requires expanding a city's capability base. We analyze how cities manage this trade-off by…
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…
Are there multiple equilibria in the spatial economy? This paper develops a unified framework that integrates systems of cities and regional models to address this question within a general geographic space. A key feature is the endogenous…
Urban development is shaped by historical, geographical, and economic factors, presenting challenges for planners in understanding urban form. This study models commute flows across multiple U.S. cities, uncovering consistent patterns in…
A longstanding puzzle in urban science is whether there's an intrinsic match between human populations and the mass of their built environments. Previous findings have revealed various urban properties scaling nonlinearly with population,…
We study the scaling of (i) numbers of workers and aggregate incomes by occupational categories against city size, and (ii) total incomes against numbers of workers in different occupations, across the functional metropolitan areas of…
Urban economic vitality is a crucial indicator of a city's long-term growth potential, comprising key metrics such as the annual number of new companies and the population employed. However, modeling urban economic vitality remains…
Given that a group of cities follows a scaling law connecting urban population with socio-economic or infrastructural metrics (transversal scaling), should we expect that each city would follow the same behavior over time (longitudinal…
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…
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 ongoing rapid urbanization phenomena make the understanding of the evolution of urban environments of utmost importance to improve the well-being and steer societies towards better futures. Many studies have focused on the emerging…
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 several recent publications, Bettencourt, West and collaborators claim that properties of cities such as gross economic production, personal income, numbers of patents filed, number of crimes committed, etc., show super-linear…
Given the importance of urban sustainability and resilience to the future of our planet, there is a need to better understand the interconnectedness between the social, economic, environmental, and governance outcomes that underline these…
Cities are often compared through scaling laws, usually expressed as power-law relations between population size and aggregate urban quantities related to infrastructure, socioeconomic activity, or environmental impacts. These laws are…
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…
Numerous urban indicators scale with population in a power law across cities, but whether the cross-sectional scaling law is applicable to the temporal growth of individual cities is unclear. Here we first find two paradoxical scaling…