Related papers: The growth equation of cities
Many outputs of cities scale in universal ways, including infrastructure, crime, and economic activity. Through a mathematical model, this study investigates the interplay between such scaling laws in human organization and governmental…
Entropy relates the fast, microscopic behaviour of the elements in a system to its slow, macroscopic state. We propose to use it to explain how, as complexity theory suggests, small scale decisions of individuals form cities. For this, we…
The emerging field of the Science of Cities has unveiled previously undiscovered facets of urban life. Contrary to the expectation of chaotic behaviour influenced solely by cultural and geographic factors, cities globally exhibit universal…
Evidences are presented concerning tantalizing regularities in cities' population-flows in what regards to space and time correlations. The former exhibit a distance-behavior (for large distances) compatible with the inverse square law,…
Analyzing and modeling the mobility process with tour behavior is fundamental to understanding a wide range of complex systems, including animal foraging, human mobility and freight transportation. However, despite their importance, the…
Understanding the statistical dynamics of growth and inequality is a fundamental challenge to ecology and society. Recent analyses of wealth and income dynamics in contemporary societies show that economic inequality is very dynamic and…
We study rank-size distribution of cities in Japan on the basis of data analysis. From the census data after World War II, we find that the rank-size distribution of cities is composed of two parts, each of which has independent power…
We present a broad, phenomenological picture of the distribution of the length of open space linear segments, $l$, derived from maps of 36 cities in 14 different countries. By scaling the Zipf plot of $l$, we obtain two master curves for a…
Uncovering the mechanism leading to the scaling law in human trajectories is of fundamental importance in understanding many spatiotemporal phenomena. We propose a hierarchical geographical model to mimic the real traffic system, upon which…
The concept of city or urban resilience has emerged as one of the key challenges for the next decades. As a consequence, institutions like the United Nations or Rockefeller Foundation have embraced initiatives that increase or improve it.…
Zipf's law states that the frequency of an observation with a given value is inversely proportional to the square of that value; Taylor's law, instead, describes the scaling between fluctuations in the size of a population and its mean.…
Urban land cover doubled between 1985 and 2015, yet the spatial dynamics of urban form remain under-quantified, despite its importance for sustainability, infrastructure planning, and climate risk. Urban expansion is a non-equilibrium…
In this second part of our survey on the social and natural distributions, we investigate some models, which intend to explain the statistical regularity of the natural and social distributions. There is a large variety of models and in…
Ecologists have long argued about the strength of density dependence and population regulation, respectively defined as the short-term and long-term rates of return to equilibrium. Here, I give three arguments for the intractability of…
Growth is a multi-layered phenomenon in human societies, composed of socioeconomic and demographic change at many different scales. Yet, standard macroeconomic indicators average over most of these processes, blurring the spatial and…
Urban sprawl reshapes cities, yet its quantitative laws remain elusive. Analyzing built-up expansion in 19 cities (1985-2015) with tools from surface growth physics in radial geometry, we reveal anisotropic, branch-like growth and a…
Cities are characterized by the coexistence of general aggregate patterns, along with many local variations. This poses challenges for analyses of urban phenomena, which tend to be either too aggregated or too local, depending on the…
Entropy is arguably one of the most powerful concepts to understand the world, from the behavior of molecules to the expansion of the universe, from how life emerges to how hybrid complex systems like cities come into being and continue…
Spatiotemporal distribution of urban population is crucial to understand the structure and dynamics of cities. Most studies, however, have focused on the microscopic structure of cities such as their few most crowded areas. In this work, we…
The scaling relations between city attributes and population are emergent and ubiquitous aspects of urban growth. Quantifying these relations and understanding their theoretical foundation, however, is difficult due to the challenge of…