Related papers: Monocentric or polycentric city? An empirical pers…
Study of urban form is an important area of research in urban planning/design that contributes to our understanding of how cities function and evolve. However, classical approaches are based on very limited observations and inconsistent…
A city is not a tree but a semi-lattice. To use a perhaps more familiar term, a city is a complex network. The complex network constitutes a unique topological perspective on cities and enables us to better understand the kind of problem a…
At the end of the five years of work in our GeoDiverCity program, we brought together a diversity of authors from different disciplines. Each person was invited to present an important question about the theories and models of urbanization.…
The quest for a theory of cities that could offer a quantitative and systematic approach to manage cities is at the top priority, given the challenges humanity faces due to the increasing urbanization and densification of cities. If such a…
How to assess the potential of liking a city or a neighborhood before ever having been there. The concept of urban quality has until now pertained to global city ranking, where cities are evaluated under a grid of given parameters, or…
Urban space is highly heterogeneous, with population and human activities concentrating in localized centers. However, the global organization of such intra-urban centers remains poorly understood due to the lack of consistent, comparable…
The difference of a city's artificial land use (ALU) radial profile to the average ALU profile is examined for 585 European cities. Using Urban Atlas 2012 data, a radial (or monocentric) approach is used to calculate a city's land use…
The current science of cities can provide a useful foundation for future urban policies, provided that these proposals have been validated by correct observations of the diversity of situations in the world. However, international…
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…
Many large cities are found at locations with certain first nature advantages. Yet, those exogenous locational features may not be the most potent forces governing the spatial pattern of cities. In particular, population size, spacing and…
Cities are characterized by concentrating population, economic activity and services. However, not all cities are equal and a natural hierarchy at local, regional or global scales spontaneously emerges. In this work, we introduce a method…
Cities are living organisms. They are out of equilibrium, open systems that never stop developing and sometimes die. The local geography can be compared to a shell constraining its development. In brief, a city's current layout is a step in…
Seen from a satellite, observing land use in the daytime or at night, most cities have circular shapes, organised around a city centre. A radial analysis of artificial land use growth is conducted in order to understand what the recent…
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…
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…
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 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.…
The visual dimension of cities has been a fundamental subject in urban studies, since the pioneering work of scholars such as Sitte, Lynch, Arnheim, and Jacobs. Several decades later, big data and artificial intelligence (AI) are…
Understanding the morphology of an urban system is an important step toward unveiling the dynamical processes of its growth and development. At the foundation of every urban system, transportation system is undeniably a crucial component in…
Urban systems are intrinsically complex, involving different dimensions and scales, and consequently various approaches and scientific disciplines. In that context, urban simulation models have been coined as essential for the construction…