Related papers: The benefits and costs of agglomeration: insights …
Agglomeration economies are a persistent subject of debate among economists and urban planners. Their definition turns on whether or not larger cities and regions are more efficient and more productive than smaller ones. We complement…
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…
Why do some economic activities agglomerate more than others? And, why does the agglomeration of some economic activities continue to increase despite recent developments in communication and transportation technologies? In this paper, we…
Recent studies have found evidence of a negative association between economic complexity and inequality at the country level. Moreover, evidence suggests that sophisticated economies tend to outsource products that are less desirable (e.g.…
The aim of this paper is to analyze the processes of polarization and agglomeration, to explain the mechanisms and causes of these phenomena in order to identify similarities and differences. As the main implication of this study should be…
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…
Urbanization promotes economy, mobility, access and availability of resources, but on the other hand, generates higher levels of pollution, violence, crime, and mental distress. The health consequences of the agglomeration of people living…
The city has proven to be the most successful form of human agglomeration and provides wide employment opportunities for its dwellers. As advances in robotics and artificial intelligence revive concerns about the impact of automation on…
In several recent publications, Bettencourt, West and collaborators claim that properties of cities such as gross economic production, personal income, numbers of patents filed, number of crimes committed, etc., show super-linear…
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…
Understanding how size influences the internal characteristics of a system is a crucial concern across various fields. Concepts like scale invariance, universalities, and fractals are fundamental to this inquiry and find application in…
Cities are characterized by the presence of a dense population with a high potential for interactions between individuals of diverse backgrounds. They appear in parallel to the Neolithic revolution a few millennia ago. The advantages…
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…
Urban scaling theory explains the increasing returns to scale of urban wealth indicators by the per capita increase of human interactions within cities. This explanation implicitly assumes urban areas as isolated entities and ignores their…
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…
Estimating the capabilities, or inputs of production, that drive and constrain the economic development of urban areas has remained a challenging goal. We posit that capabilities are instantiated in the complexity and sophistication of…
A good understanding of cities is crucial to implement urban planning policies leading to social and economic sustainability and an efficient use of resources. While urban concentration has been associated with both positive and negative…
Challenges due to the rapid urbanization of the world -- especially in emerging countries -- range from an increasing dependence on energy, to air pollution, socio-spatial inequalities, environmental and sustainability issues. Modelling the…
Human settlements on Earth are scattered in a multitude of shapes, sizes and spatial arrangements. These patterns are often not random but a result of complex geographical, cultural, economic and historical processes that have profound…
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,…