Related papers: Observing cities as a complex system
The current science of cities can provide a useful foundation for future urban policies, provided that these proposals have been validated by correct observations of the diversity of situations in the world. However, international…
The emerging field of the Science of Cities has unveiled previously undiscovered facets of urban life. Contrary to the expectation of chaotic behaviour influenced solely by cultural and geographic factors, cities globally exhibit universal…
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…
Urban scaling laws relate socio-economic, behavioral, and physical variables to the population size of cities and allow for a new paradigm of city planning, and an understanding of urban resilience and economies. Independently of culture…
As urban critic Jane Jacobs conceived, a city is essentially the problem of organized complexity. What underlies the complexity refers to a structural factor, called living structure, which is defined as a mathematical structure composed of…
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…
Understanding scaling relations of social and environmental attributes of urban systems is necessary for effectively managing cities. Urban scaling theory (UST) has assumed that population density scales positively with city size. We…
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…
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…
Complex systems have become a popular lens for analyzing cities and complexity theory has many implications for urban performance and resilience. This paper develops a typology of measures and indicators for assessing the physical…
The topological organization of several world cities are studied according to respective representations by complex networks. As a first step, the city maps are processed by a recently developed methodology that allows the most significant…
The curves of scaling behavior is a significant concept in fractal dimension analysis of complex systems. However, the underlying rationale of this kind of curves for fractal cities is not yet clear. The aim of this paper is at researching…
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…
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…
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…
Cities are typical dynamic complex systems that connect people and facilitate interactions. Revealing universal collective patterns behind spatio-temporal interactions between residents is crucial for various urban studies, of which we are…
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…
Urban scaling analysis, the study of how aggregated urban features vary with the population of an urban area, provides a promising framework for discovering commonalities across cities and uncovering dynamics shared by cities across time…
Superlinear scaling in cities, which appears in sociological quantities such as economic productivity and creative output relative to urban population size, has been observed but not been given a satisfactory theoretical explanation. Here…
Thomas Schelling proposed an influential simple spatial model to illustrate how, even with relatively mild assumptions on each individual's nearest neighbor preferences, an integrated city would likely unravel to a segregated city, even if…