Related papers: The statistical physics of Cities
Understanding how people move in the urban area is important for solving urbanization issues, such as traffic management, urban planning, epidemic control, and communication network improvement. Leveraging recent availability of large…
Urban systems, as dynamic complex systems, continuously generate spatio-temporal data streams that encode the fundamental laws of human mobility and city evolution. While AI for Science has witnessed the transformative power of foundation…
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…
The boundaries between physical and social networks have narrowed with the advent of the Internet and its pervasive platforms. This has given rise to a complex adaptive information ecosystem where individuals and machines compete for…
The morphology of urban agglomeration is studied here in the context of information exchange between different spatio-temporal scales. Cities are multidimensional non-linear phenomena, so understanding the relationships and connectivity…
It is still common wisdom amongst economists, politicians and lay people that economic growth is a necessity of our social systems, at least to avoid distributional conflicts. This paper challenges such belief moving from a purely physical…
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…
Urban growth sometimes leads to rigid infrastructure that struggles to adapt to changing demand. This paper introduces a novel approach, aiming to enable cities to evolve and respond more effectively to such dynamic demand. It identifies…
Urban systems are composed by complex couplings of several components, and more particularly between the built environment and transportation networks. Their interaction is involved in the emergence of the urban form. We propose in this…
Recent decades have seen a rise in the use of physics methods to study different societal phenomena. This development has been due to physicists venturing outside of their traditional domains of interest, but also due to scientists from…
Analyses of urban scaling laws assume that observations in different cities are independent of the existence of nearby cities. Here we introduce generative models and data-analysis methods that overcome this limitation by modelling…
Universality in the behavior of complex systems often reveals itself in the form of scale-invariant distributions that are essentially independent of the details of the microscopic dynamics. A representative paradigm of complex behavior in…
Scaling laws are powerful summaries of the variations of urban attributes with city size. However, the validity of their universal meaning for cities is hampered by the observation that different scaling regimes can be encountered for the…
The application of Statistical Physics to social systems is mainly related to the search for macroscopic laws, that can be derived from experimental data averaged in time or space,assuming the system in a steady state. One of the major…
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…
There are many benefits and costs that come from people and firms clustering together in space. Agglomeration economies, in particular, are the manifestation of centripetal forces that make larger cities disproportionately more wealthy than…
The visual dimension of cities has been a fundamental subject in urban studies, since the pioneering work of scholars such as Sitte, Lynch, Arnheim, and Jacobs. Several decades later, big data and artificial intelligence (AI) are…
Civilization produces knowledge, which acts as the driving force of its development. A macro-model of civilization that accounts for the effect of knowledge production on population, energy consumption and environmental conditions is…
The shape of urban settlements plays a fundamental role in their sustainable planning. Properly defining the boundaries of cities is challenging and remains an open problem in the Science of Cities. Here, we propose a worldwide model to…
The climate system is a forced, dissipative, nonlinear, complex and heterogeneous system that is out of thermodynamic equilibrium. The system exhibits natural variability on many scales of motion, in time as well as space, and it is subject…