Related papers: The benefits and costs of agglomeration: insights …
The amount of data that is being gathered about cities is increasing in size and specificity. However, despite this wealth of information, we still have little understanding of what really drives the processes behind urbanisation. In this…
We analyze the congestion data collected by a GPS device company (TomTom) for almost 300 urban areas in the world. Using simple scaling arguments and data fitting we show that congestion during peak hours in large cities grows essentially…
Cities are systems with a large number of constituents and agents interacting with each other and can be considered as emblematic of complex systems. Modeling these systems is a real challenge and triggered the interest of many disciplines…
Understanding how spatial configurations of economic activity emerge is important when formulating spatial planning and economic policy. A simple model was proposed by Simon, who assumed that firms grow at a rate proportional to their size,…
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…
In this paper, we apply recent findings from urban scaling theory to evaluate how it could be applied to a one-dimensional archetypal city. Our focus is on how the simplicity of a one-dimensional model can provide intuitive insights that…
Understanding cities is central to addressing major global challenges from climate and health to economic resilience. Although increasingly perceived as fundamental socio-economic units, the detailed fabric of urban economic activities is…
Firms in denser areas are more productive, a pattern attributed to agglomeration economies and firm selection. To disentangle these two channels, the popular approach of Combes et al. (2012, ECTA) critically assumes that total factor…
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…
We develop a theoretical framework to investigate the link between rising scale economies and stagnating productivity. Our model features heterogeneous firms, imperfect competition, and firm selection. We demonstrate that scale economies…
Great cities connect people; failed cities isolate people. Despite the fundamental importance of physical, face-to-face social-ties in the functioning of cities, these connectivity networks are not explicitly observed in their entirety.…
Over the last decades, in disciplines as diverse as economics, geography, and complex systems, a perspective has arisen proposing that many properties of cities are quantitatively predictable due to agglomeration or scaling effects. Using…
Scaling has been proposed as a powerful tool to analyze the properties of complex systems, and in particular for cities where it describes how various properties change with population. The empirical study of scaling on a wide range of…
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…
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…
Given the importance of urban sustainability and resilience to the future of our planet, there is a need to better understand the interconnectedness between the social, economic, environmental, and governance outcomes that underline these…
Although the cluster theory literature is bountiful in economics and regional science, there is still a lack of understanding of how the geographical scales of analysis (neighbourhood, city, region) relate to one another and impact the…
The recent availability of data for cities has allowed scientists to exhibit scalings which present themselves in the form of a power-law dependence with population of various socio-economical and structural indicators. We propose here a…
For Adam Smith, wealth was related to the division of labor. As people and firms specialize in different activities, economic efficiency increases, suggesting that development is associated with an increase in the number of individual…
An agglomerative clustering of random variables is proposed, where clusters of random variables sharing the maximum amount of multivariate mutual information are merged successively to form larger clusters. Compared to the previous…