Related papers: Observing cities as a complex system
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…
The visual dimension of cities has been a fundamental subject in urban studies, since the pioneering work of scholars such as Sitte, Lynch, Arnheim, and Jacobs. Several decades later, big data and artificial intelligence (AI) are…
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…
Quantifying the spatial organization of human settlements is fundamental to understanding the complexity of urban systems. However, the quantitative patterns of the distribution of villages, towns, and cities that lie between random and…
Unveiling the relationships between crime and socioeconomic factors is crucial for modeling and preventing these illegal activities. Recently, a significant advance has been made in understanding the influence of urban metrics on the levels…
Cities play a pivotal role in human development and sustainability, yet studying them presents significant challenges due to the vast scale and complexity of spatial-temporal data. One such challenge is the need to uncover universal urban…
Entropy relates the fast, microscopic behaviour of the elements in a system to its slow, macroscopic state. We propose to use it to explain how, as complexity theory suggests, small scale decisions of individuals form cities. For this, we…
The growth of cities has traditionally been studied from a population perspective, while urban expansion-its spatial growth-has often been approached qualitatively. However, characterizing and modeling this spatial expansion is crucial,…
In this commentary we discuss the validity of scaling laws and their relevance for understanding urban systems and helping policy makers. We show how the recent controversy about the scaling of CO2 transport-related emissions with…
Developing a scientific understanding of cities in a fast urbanizing world is essential for planning sustainable urban systems. Recently, it was shown that income and wealth creation follow increasing returns, scaling superlinearly with…
We propose and test a model that describes the morphology of cities, the scaling of the urban perimeter of individual cities, and the area distribution of systems of cities. The model is also consistent with observable urban growth…
The scaling relations between city attributes and population are emergent and ubiquitous aspects of urban growth. Quantifying these relations and understanding their theoretical foundation, however, is difficult due to the challenge of…
Understanding the morphology of an urban system is an important step toward unveiling the dynamical processes of its growth and development. At the foundation of every urban system, transportation system is undeniably a crucial component in…
Recent studies of urban scaling show that important socioeconomic city characteristics such as wealth and innovation capacity exhibit a nonlinear, particularly a power law scaling with population size. These nonlinear effects are common to…
The size of cities is known to play a fundamental role in social and economic life. Yet, its relation to the structure of the underlying network of human interactions has not been investigated empirically in detail. In this paper, we map…
The study of spacetime, and its role in understanding functional systems has received little attention in information science. Recent work, on the origin of universal scaling in cities and biological systems, provides an intriguing insight…
Despite the rapid growth of cities in the past century, our quantitative, in-depth understanding of how cities grow remains limited due to a consistent lack of historical data. Thus, the scaling laws between a city's features and its…
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…
We have assembled CO2 emission figures from collections of urban GHG emission estimates published in peer reviewed journals or reports from research institutes and non-governmental organizations. Analyzing the scaling with population size…
Universality in the behavior of complex systems often reveals itself in the form of scale-invariant distributions that are essentially independent of the details of the microscopic dynamics. A representative paradigm of complex behavior in…