Related papers: From form to information: Analysing built environm…

Prevailing hypotheses recognize cities as 'super-organisms' which both provides organizing principles for cities and fills the scalar gap in the hierarchical living system between ecosystems and the entire planet. However, most analogies…

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…

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…

Understanding the relationship between population and the built environment is essential for addresing socio-spatial inequalities. While researchers have long theorized these dynamics, empirical analyses remain limited. This study develops…

In recent decades the world has experienced rates of urban growth unparalleled in any other period of history and this growth is shaping the environment in which an increasing proportion of us live. In this paper we use a longitudinal…

What people choose to see, like, or remember is of profound interest to city planners and architects. Previous research suggests what people are more likely to store in their memory - buildings with dominant shapes and bright colors,…

The confluence of recent advances in availability of geospatial information, computing power, and artificial intelligence offers new opportunities to understand how and where our cities differ or are alike. Departing from a traditional…

Why are some neighborhoods strongly connected while others remain isolated? Although standard explanations focus on demographics, economics, and geography, movement across the city may also depend on cultural styles and amenity mix. This…

Entropy is a measure of heterogeneity widely used in applied sciences, often when data are collected over space. Recently, a number of approaches has been proposed to include spatial information in entropy. The aim of entropy is to…

Cities are systems with a large number of constituents and agents interacting with each other and can be considered as emblematic of complex systems. Modeling these systems is a real challenge and triggered the interest of many disciplines…

Urban planning and morphology have relied on analytical cartography and visual communication tools for centuries to illustrate spatial patterns, propose designs, compare alternatives, and engage the public. Classic urban form visualizations…

We propose a quantitative method to classify cities according to their street pattern. We use the conditional probability distribution of shape factor of blocks with a given area, and define what could constitute the `fingerprint' of a…

Street networks may be planned according to clear organizing principles or they may evolve organically through accretion, but their configurations and orientations help define a city's spatial logic and order. Measures of entropy reveal a…

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…

Understanding how urban systems and traffic dynamics co-evolve is crucial for advancing sustainable and resilient cities. However, their bidirectional causal relationships remain underexplored due to challenges of simultaneously inferring…

During a spontaneous change, a macroscopic physical system will evolve towards a macro-state with more realizations. This observation is at the basis of the Statistical Mechanical version of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and it provides…

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…

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…

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…

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…