Related papers: From form to information: Analysing built environm…
Human development has far-reaching impacts on the surface of the globe. The transformation of natural land cover occurs in different forms and urban growth is one of the most eminent transformative processes. We analyze global land cover…
Cities are physical manifestations of our competitive and cooperative behaviours. The tension between these two forces generates dynamic equilibriums whose material expressions are cities and their evolutions. In a Darwinian cooperative…
Agglomeration economies drive urban growth at different spatial scales by enabling productivity gains, knowledge spillovers, and shared inputs among proximate firms and amenities. To develop a unified science of cities it is thus important…
The spatial distribution of income shapes the structure and organisation of cities and its understanding has broad societal implications. Despite an abundant literature, many issues remain unclear. In particular, all definitions of…
What people buy is an important aspect or view of lifestyles. Studying people's shopping patterns in different urban regions can not only provide valuable information for various commercial opportunities, but also enable a better…
Diverse sociocultural influences in rapidly growing dense urban areas may induce strain on civil services and reduce the resilience of those areas to exogenous and endogenous shocks. We present a novel approach with foundations in computer…
We present an information-theoretic approach inspired by distributional clustering to assess the structural heterogeneity of particulate systems. Our method identifies communities of particles that share a similar local structure by…
Is there a general economic pathway recapitulated by individual cities over and over? Identifying such evolution structure, if any, would inform models for the assessment, maintenance, and forecasting of urban sustainability and economic…
The distribution of the population of cities has attracted a great deal of attention, in part because it sharply constrains models of local growth. However, to this day, there is no consensus on the distribution below the very upper tail,…
Several approaches and corresponding definitions of complexity have been developed in different fields. Urban systems are the archetype of complex socio-technical systems concerned with these different viewpoints. We suggest in this chapter…
The prevalence of many urban phenomena changes systematically with population size. We propose a theory that unifies models of economic complexity and cultural evolution to derive urban scaling. The theory accounts for the difference in…
Sustainable urban design or planning is not a LEGO-like assembly of prefabricated elements, but an embryo-like growth with persistent differentiation and adaptation towards a coherent whole. The coherent whole has a striking character -…
According to E.T. Jaynes and E.P. Wigner, entropy is an anthropomorphic concept in the sense that in a physical system correspond many thermodynamic systems. The physical system can be examined from many points of view each time examining…
We study a stochastic model of urban growth generating spatial distributions of population densities at an intermediate mesoscopic scale. The model is based on the antagonist interplay between the two opposite abstract processes of…
The concept of entropy, firstly introduced in information theory, rapidly became popular in many applied sciences via Shannon's formula to measure the degree of heterogeneity among observations. A rather recent research field aims at…
Human flourishing is often severely limited by persistent violence. Quantitative conflict research has found common temporal and other statistical patterns in warfare, but very little is understood about its general spatial patterns. While…
The interactions of individuals with city neighbourhoods is determined, in part, by the perceived quality of urban environments. Perceived neighbourhood quality is a core component of urban vitality, influencing social cohesion, sense of…
Many cities are expanding in areas with scarce rainfall and limited water retention capacity, and are also becoming elongated and sprawled, making it harder to deliver services. This study quantifies the impact of urban form on access to…
The accurate estimation of human activity in cities is one of the first steps towards understanding the structure of the urban environment. Human activities are highly granular and dynamic in spatial and temporal dimensions. Estimating…
As a consequence of the accelerated globalization process, today major cities all over the world are characterized by an increasing multiculturalism. The integration of immigrant communities may be affected by social polarization and…