Related papers: The Coherence of US cities
Road networks represent a key component of human settlements, such as cities, towns, and villages, that mediate pollution and congestion, as well as economic development. However, little is known about the long-term development trajectories…
How are economic activities linked to geographic locations? To answer this question, we use a data-driven approach that builds on the information about location, ownership and economic activities of the world's 3,000 largest firms and their…
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…
A growing body of research documents that the size and growth of an industry in a place depends on how much related activity is found there. This fact is commonly referred to as the "principle of relatedness". However, there is no consensus…
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…
We study the relationship between firms' performance and their technological portfolios using tools borrowed from the complexity science. In particular, we ask whether the accumulation of knowledge and capabilities related to a coherent set…
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,…
Economic growth is conventionally analyzed at the national level, yet cities generate the bulk of global output. Here we construct GDP trajectories for 8,808 functional urban areas (FUAs) across 165 countries over 1993-2019 using…
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…
The process of urbanization is one of the most important phenomenon of our societies and it is only recently that the availability of massive amounts of geolocalized historical data allows us to address quantitatively some of its features.…
While great emphasis has been placed on the role of social interactions as driver of innovation growth, very few empirical studies have explicitly investigated the impact of social network structures on the innovation performance of cities.…
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…
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.…
Increasing evidence suggests that cities are complex systems, with structural and dynamical features responsible for a broad spectrum of emerging phenomena. Here we use a unique data set of human flows and couple it with information on the…
Contemporary literature on the dynamics of economic activities in growing cities mainly focused on a few years or decades time frames. Using a new geo-historical database constructed from historical directories with about 1 million entries,…
Are there multiple equilibria in the spatial economy? This paper develops a unified framework that integrates systems of cities and regional models to address this question within a general geographic space. A key feature is the endogenous…
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…
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…
Commuting is a key mechanism that governs the dynamics of cities. Despite its importance, very little is known of the properties and mechanisms underlying this crucial urban process. Here, we capitalize on $\sim$ 50 million individuals'…
By borrowing methods from complex system analysis, in this paper we analyze the features of the complex relationship that links the development and the industrialization of a country to economic inequality. In order to do this, we identify…