Related papers: The statistical physics of Cities

Urban transformations within large and growing metropolitan areas often generate critical dynamics affecting social interactions, transport connectivity and income flow distribution. We develop a statistical-mechanical model of urban…

The shape of buildings plays a critical role in the energy efficiency, lifestyles, land use and infrastructure systems of cities. Thus, as most of the world's cities continue to grow and develop, understanding the interplay between the…

Car traffic in urban systems has been studied intensely in past decades but models are either limited to a specific aspect of traffic or applied to a specific region. Despite the importance and urgency of the problem we have a poor…

The concept of city or urban resilience has emerged as one of the key challenges for the next decades. As a consequence, institutions like the United Nations or Rockefeller Foundation have embraced initiatives that increase or improve it.…

Assuming that the ultimate purpose of the city is to provide support to human interaction and that opportunities to that social interaction are unevenly distributed across the urban fabric, this paper reports some attempts to describe such…

Transportation systems can be conceptualized as an instrument of spreading people and resources over the territory, playing an important role in developing sustainable cities. The current rationale of transport provision is based on…

Cities emerged independently across different world regions and historical periods, raising fundamental questions: How did the first urban settlements develop? What social and spatial conditions enabled their emergence? Are these processes…

Complex systems have become a popular lens for analyzing cities and complexity theory has many implications for urban performance and resilience. This paper develops a typology of measures and indicators for assessing the physical…

The dynamics of city's spatial structures are determined by the coupling of functional components (such as restaurants and shops) and human beings within the city. Yet, there still lacks mechanism models to quantify the spatial distribution…

We attempt to take a comprehensive look at the challenges of representing the spatio-temporal structures and dynamic processes defining a city's overall characteristics. For the task of urban planning and urban operation, we take the stance…

Efficient networking has a substantial economic and societal impact in a broad range of areas including transportation systems, wired and wireless communications and a range of Internet applications. As transportation and communication…

Cities are living organisms. They are out of equilibrium, open systems that never stop developing and sometimes die. The local geography can be compared to a shell constraining its development. In brief, a city's current layout is a step in…

In this commentary we discuss the validity of scaling laws and their relevance for understanding urban systems and helping policy makers. We show how the recent controversy about the scaling of CO2 transport-related emissions with…

Processes of mass communications in complicated social or sociobiological systems such as marketing, economics, politics, animal populations, etc. as a subject for the special scientific discipline - "mediaphysics" - are considered in its…

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…

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…

Migration plays a crucial role in urban growth. Over time, individuals opting to relocate led to vast metropolises like London and Paris during the Industrial Revolution, Shanghai and Karachi during the last decades and thousands of smaller…

Urban systems are intrinsically complex, involving different dimensions and scales, and consequently various approaches and scientific disciplines. In that context, urban simulation models have been coined as essential for the construction…

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.…

Unveiling the relationships between crime and socioeconomic factors is crucial for modeling and preventing these illegal activities. Recently, a significant advance has been made in understanding the influence of urban metrics on the levels…