Related papers: Observing cities as a complex system
The distribution of living languages is investigated and scaling relations are found for the diversity of languages as a function of the country area and population. These results are compared with data from Ecology and from computer…
Cities attract a daily influx of non-resident commuters, reflecting their roles within wider urban networks -- not as isolated places. However, it remains unclear how this interconnectivity shapes the way crime scales with population, given…
Urban mobility systems are composed multiple elements with strong interactions, i.e. their future is co-determined by the state of other elements. Thus, studying components in isolation, i.e. using a reductionist approach, is inappropriate.…
As of 2014, 54% of the earth's population resides in urban areas, and it is steadily increasing, expecting to reach 66% by 2050. Urban areas range from small cities with tens of thousands of people to megacities with greater than 10 million…
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…
The scaling of urban characteristics with total population has become an important research field since one needs to better understand the challenges of urban densification. Yet urban scaling research is largely disconnected from…
Urban systems are composed by complex couplings of several components, and more particularly between the built environment and transportation networks. Their interaction is involved in the emergence of the urban form. We propose in this…
Cities generate gains from interaction, but citizens often experience segregation as they move around the urban environment. Using GPS location data, we identify four distinct patterns of experienced segregation across US cities. Most…
Complex systems are characterized by specific time-dependent interactions among their many constituents. As a consequence they often manifest rich, non-trivial and unexpected behavior. Examples arise both in the physical and non-physical…
Sustainable urban design or planning is not a LEGO-like assembly of prefabricated elements, but an embryo-like growth with persistent differentiation and adaptation towards a coherent whole. The coherent whole has a striking character -…
A substantial share of the Earth's land surface is managed by humans, with cities representing the most extreme form of anthropogenic land use. There are zillion ways in which settlements can be arranged across a given area, and their…
Given the size of modern cities in the urbanising age, it is beyond the perceptual capacity of most people to develop a good knowledge about the beauty and ugliness of the city at every street corner. Correspondingly, for planners, it is…
Ecology studies biodiversity in its variety and complexity. It describes how species distribute and perform in response to environmental changes. Ecological processes and structures are highly complex and adaptive. In order to quantify…
Understanding and potentially predicting or even controlling urban labour markets represents a great challenge for workers and policy makers alike. Cities are effective engines of economic growth and prosperity and incubate complex dynamics…
The margins within the geographic range of species are often specific in terms of ecological and evolutionary processes, and can strongly influence the species' reaction to climate change. One of the frequently observed features at range…
Urban land growth presents a major sustainability challenge, yet its growth patterns and dynamics remain unclear. We quantified urban land evolution by analyzing its statistical distribution in 14 regions and countries over 29 years. The…
We study the connection between urban scaling, fundamental allometry (between city population and city area), and per capita vs.\ population density scaling. From simple analytical derivations we obtain the relation between the 3 involved…
In 2012 the world's population exceeded 7 billion, and since 2008 the number of individuals living in urban areas has surpassed that of rural areas. This is the result of an overall increase of life expectancy in many countries that has…
Human mobility patterns deeply affect the dynamics of many social systems. In this paper, we empirically analyze the real-world human movements based GPS records, and observe rich scaling properties in the temporal-spatial patterns as well…
According to the theory of urban scaling, urban indicators scale with city size in a predictable fashion. In particular, indicators of social and economic productivity are expected to have a superlinear relation. This behavior was verified…