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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…
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…
Why are some neighborhoods strongly connected while others remain isolated? Although standard explanations focus on demographics, economics, and geography, movement across the city may also depend on cultural styles and amenity mix. This…
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…
Assuming that the ultimate purpose of the city is to provide support to human interaction and that opportunities to that social interaction are unevenly distributed across the urban fabric, this paper reports some attempts to describe such…
The shape of urban settlements plays a fundamental role in their sustainable planning. Properly defining the boundaries of cities is challenging and remains an open problem in the Science of Cities. Here, we propose a worldwide model to…
In an impending urban age where the majority of the world's population will live in cities, it is critical that we improve our understanding of the strengths and limitations of existing city designs to ensure they are safe, clean, can…
Urban-induced microclimate variations, such as urban heat islands and air pollution, scale with city size, producing distinctive relations between average climate variables and city-scale quantities (e.g., total population). However, these…
In recent decades the world has experienced rates of urban growth unparalleled in any other period of history and this growth is shaping the environment in which an increasing proportion of us live. In this paper we use a longitudinal…
Understanding the relationship between urban form and structure and spatial variation of property flood risk has been a longstanding challenge in urban planning and city flood risk management. Yet limited data-driven insights exist…
Two fundamental issues surrounding research on the image of the city respectively focus on the city's external and internal representations. The external representation in the context of this paper refers to the city itself, external to…
Understanding human mobility patterns -- how people move in their everyday lives -- is an interdisciplinary research field. It is a question with roots back to the 19th century that has been dramatically revitalized with the recent increase…
Urban scaling laws summarize how urban attributes evolve with city size. Recent criticism questions notably the aggregate view of this approach, which leads to neglecting the internal structure of cities. This is all the more relevant for…
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…
Recently humanity has just crossed an important landmark in its history with the majority of people now living in large cities. This population concentration is capable of boosting the growth of positive indicators such as innovation, the…
Quantifying the population density of an urban area is a fraught issue. Measures of density are often defined differently from place to place or applied inconsistently, and arguments abound over just how much of the land surrounding a city…
We study a model for the so called "city effect" in which an earthquake can be locally enhanced by the collective response of tall buildings in a large city. We use a set of equations coupling vibrations in buildings to motion under the…
Investigations of a possible connection between population density and the propagation and magnitude of epidemics have so far led to mixed and unconvincing results. There are three reasons for that. (i) Previous studies did not focus on the…
Understanding demographic and migrational patterns constitutes a great challenge. Millions of individual decisions, motivated by economic, political, demographic, rational, and/or emotional reasons underlie the high complexity of…
Urban displacement - when a household is forced to relocate due to conditions affecting its home or surroundings - often results from rising housing costs, particularly in wealthy, prosperous cities. However, its dynamics are complex and…