Related papers: Modeling cities
Urban areas are a high-stake target of climate change mitigation and adaptation measures. To understand, predict and improve the energy performance of cities, the scientific community develops numerical models that describe how they…
Urban scaling laws relate socio-economic, behavioral, and physical variables to the population size of cities and allow for a new paradigm of city planning, and an understanding of urban resilience and economies. Independently of culture…
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…
Measurements play a crucial role in doing physics: Their results provide the basis on which we adopt or reject physical theories. In this note, we examine the effect of subjecting measurements themselves to our experience. We require that…
In this article, the notion of a mathematical model in science is attempted to be enlightened from several points of view. In particular, it is shown that mathematical models are introduced differently and used differently in different…
I give an overview of the topic of this special issue, the applications of (statistical) physics to social sciences at large. I discuss several examples of simple social models put forward by physicists and discuss their interest. I argue…
The dynamics of urban systems can be understood from an evolutionary perspective, in some sense extending biological and cultural evolution. Models for systems of cities implementing elementary evolutionary processes remain however to be…
The enterprise of trying to explain different social and economic phenomena using concepts and ideas drawn from physics has a long history. Statistical mechanics, in particular, has been often seen as most likely to provide the means to…
Over the last decades, in disciplines as diverse as economics, geography, and complex systems, a perspective has arisen proposing that many properties of cities are quantitatively predictable due to agglomeration or scaling effects. Using…
Understanding and potentially predicting or even controlling urban labour markets represents a great challenge for workers and policy makers alike. Cities are effective engines of economic growth and prosperity and incubate complex dynamics…
Great cities connect people; failed cities isolate people. Despite the fundamental importance of physical, face-to-face social-ties in the functioning of cities, these connectivity networks are not explicitly observed in their entirety.…
Economic activities favor mutual geographical proximity and concentrate spatially to form cities. In a world of diminishing transport costs, however, the advantage of physical proximity is fading, and the role of cities in the economy may…
Physicists study a wide variety of phenomena creating new interdisciplinary research fields by applying theories and methods originally developed in physics in order to solve problems in economics, social science, biology, medicine,…
This paper propose the concept of big model as a novel research paradigm for regional and urban studies. Big models are fine-scale regional/urban simulation models for a large geographical area, and they overcome the trade-off between…
In this paper, we apply recent findings from urban scaling theory to evaluate how it could be applied to a one-dimensional archetypal city. Our focus is on how the simplicity of a one-dimensional model can provide intuitive insights that…
Containing the spreading of crime in urban societies remains a major challenge. Empirical evidence suggests that, left unchecked, crimes may be recurrent and proliferate. On the other hand, eradicating a culture of crime may be difficult,…
Robots are increasingly tested in public spaces, towards a future where urban environments are not only for humans but for autonomous systems. While robots are promising, for convenience and efficiency, there are challenges associated with…
Many have wondered how mathematics, which appears to be the result of both human creativity and human discovery, can possibly exhibit the degree of success and seemingly-universal applicability to quantifying the physical world as…
In shared space environments, urban space is shared among different types of road users, who frequently interact with each other to negotiate priority and coordinate their trajectories. Instead of traffic rules, interactions among them are…
Communities are an important feature of social networks. In fact, it seems that communities are necessary for a social network to be efficient. However, there exist very few formal studies of the actual role of communities in social…