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Related papers: The growth equation of cities

200 papers

A longstanding puzzle in urban science is whether there's an intrinsic match between human populations and the mass of their built environments. Previous findings have revealed various urban properties scaling nonlinearly with population,…

Physics and Society · Physics 2025-08-11 Kangning Huang , Mingzhen Lu

Throughout history most young adults have chosen to live where their parents did while a smaller number moved away. This is sufficient, by proof and simulation, to account for the well-known power law distributions of city sizes. The model…

Physics and Society · Physics 2024-05-06 Robin W. Spencer

Time evolutions of number of cities, population of cities, world population, and size distribution of present languages are studied in terms of a new model, where population of each city increases by a random rate and decreases by a random…

Physics and Society · Physics 2016-12-27 Caglar Tuncay

Understanding quantitative relationships between urban elements is crucial for a wide range of applications. The observation at the macroscopic level demonstrates that the aggregated urban quantities (e.g., gross domestic product) scale…

Physics and Society · Physics 2021-01-26 Lei Dong , Zhou Huang , Jiang Zhang , Yu Liu

Urban development is shaped by historical, geographical, and economic factors, presenting challenges for planners in understanding urban form. This study models commute flows across multiple U.S. cities, uncovering consistent patterns in…

Physics and Society · Physics 2024-11-11 Margarita Mishina , Mingyi He , Venu Garikapati , Stanislav Sobolevsky

We propose hypotheses describing the empirical finding of an association between the exponents of urban GDP scaling and Zipf's law for cities. These hypotheses represent various combinations of directional or reciprocal causal links between…

Physics and Society · Physics 2021-07-27 Fabiano L. Ribeiro , Jose Lobo , Diego Rybski

Urban morphology has presented significant intellectual challenges to mathematicians and physicists ever since the eighteenth century, when Euler first explored the famous Konigsberg bridges problem. Many important regularities and scaling…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-10-28 A. Paolo Masucci , Elsa Arcaute , Erez Hatna , Kiril Stanilov , Michael Batty

There is strong expectation that cities, across time, culture and level of development, share much in common in terms of their form and function. Recently, attempts to formalize mathematically these expectations have led to the hypothesis…

Physics and Society · Physics 2013-01-28 Luis M. A. Bettencourt , Jose Lobo , Hyejin Youn

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…

Physics and Society · Physics 2025-04-03 Rafael Prieto-Curiel , Carmen Cabrera-Arnau

Time evolution of the cities and of the languages is considered in terms of multiplicative noise and fragmentation processes; where power law (Pareto-Zipf law) and slightly asymmetric log-normal (Gauss) distribution result for the size…

Physics and Society · Physics 2009-11-13 C. Tuncay

Cities can be characterised and modelled through different urban measures. Consistency within these observables is crucial in order to advance towards a science of cities. Bettencourt et al have proposed that many of these urban measures…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-12-22 Elsa Arcaute , Erez Hatna , Peter Ferguson , Hyejin Youn , Anders Johansson , Michael Batty

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…

General Economics · Economics 2021-01-11 Tomoya Mori , Minoru Osawa

Cities are some of the most intricate and advanced creations of humanity. Most objects in cities are perfectly synchronised to coordinate activities such as jobs, education, transportation, entertainment, and waste management. Although each…

Physics and Society · Physics 2026-04-01 Rafael Prieto-Curiel

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…

Physics and Society · Physics 2019-08-21 Carlos Molinero , Stefan Thurner

This chapter is about Complexity and Spatial Dynamics in Urban Systems. Strong inequalities in the size of cities and the apparent difficulty of limiting their growth raise practical issues for spatial planning. At a time when new…

Physics and Society · Physics 2020-10-29 Juste Raimbault , Denise Pumain

Urbanization has been the dominant demographic trend in the entire world, during the last half century. Rural to urban migration, international migration, and the re-classification or expansion of existing city boundaries have been among…

Physics and Society · Physics 2013-12-19 Philippe Blanchard , Dimitri Volchenkov

Background: Zipf's law and Heaps' law are two representatives of the scaling concepts, which play a significant role in the study of complexity science. The coexistence of the Zipf's law and the Heaps' law motivates different understandings…

Physics and Society · Physics 2011-05-26 Lin Wang , Xiang Li , Yi-Qing Zhang , Yan Zhang , Kan Zhang

Power-law distributions with various exponents are studied. We first introduce a simple and generic model that reproduces Zipf's law. We can regard this model both as the time evolution of the population of cities and that of the asset…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2007-05-23 Kenji Kawamura , Naomichi Hatano

An important issue in the study of cities is defining a metropolitan area, as different definitions affect the statistical distribution of urban activity. A commonly employed method of defining a metropolitan area is the Metropolitan…

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…