Related papers: Observing cities as a complex system
Many large cities are found at locations with certain first nature advantages. Yet, those exogenous locational features may not be the most potent forces governing the spatial pattern of cities. In particular, population size, spacing and…
A city is not a tree but a semi-lattice. To use a perhaps more familiar term, a city is a complex network. The complex network constitutes a unique topological perspective on cities and enables us to better understand the kind of problem a…
Many approaches have dealt with the hypothesis that the environment contain information, mostly focusing on how humans decode information from the environment in visual perception, navigation, and spatial decision-making. A question yet to…
Cities are changing constantly. All urban systems face different conditions from day to day. Even when averaged regularities can be found, urban systems will be more efficient if they can adapt to changes at the same temporal scales at…
Urban areas with larger and more connected populations offer an auspicious environment for contagion processes such as the spread of pathogens. Empirical evidence reveals a systematic increase in the rates of certain sexually transmitted…
The morphology of urban agglomeration is studied here in the context of information exchange between different spatio-temporal scales. Cities are multidimensional non-linear phenomena, so understanding the relationships and connectivity…
Study of urban form is an important area of research in urban planning/design that contributes to our understanding of how cities function and evolve. However, classical approaches are based on very limited observations and inconsistent…
Great cities connect people; failed cities isolate people. Despite the fundamental importance of physical, face-to-face social-ties in the functioning of cities, these connectivity networks are not explicitly observed in their entirety.…
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…
This paper attempts to create a first comprehensive analysis of the integrated characteristics of contemporary Indian cities, using scaling and geographic analysis over a set of diverse indicators. We use data at the level of Urban…
Economic activities favor mutual geographical proximity and concentrate spatially to form cities. In a world of diminishing transport costs, however, the advantage of physical proximity is fading, and the role of cities in the economy may…
Spatial organisation of physical form of an urban system, or city, both manifests and influences the way its social form functions. Mathematical quantification of the spatial pattern of a city is, therefore, important for understanding…
Agglomeration economies are a persistent subject of debate among economists and urban planners. Their definition turns on whether or not larger cities and regions are more efficient and more productive than smaller ones. We complement…
Human settlements on Earth are scattered in a multitude of shapes, sizes and spatial arrangements. These patterns are often not random but a result of complex geographical, cultural, economic and historical processes that have profound…
Many aggregate distributions of urban activities such as city sizes reveal scaling but hardly any work exists on the properties of spatial distributions within individual cities, notwithstanding considerable knowledge about their fractal…
Human mobility is a fundamental process underpinning socioeconomic life and urban structure. Classic theories, such as egocentric activity spaces and central place theory, provide crucial insights into specific facets of movement, like…
Urbanization has been the dominant demographic trend in the entire world, during the last half century. Rural to urban migration, international migration, and the re-classification or expansion of existing city boundaries have been among…
We study centrality in urban street patterns of different world cities represented as networks in geographical space. The results indicate that a spatial analysis based on a set of four centrality indices allows an extended visualization…
Half of the world population resides in cities and urban segregation is becoming a global issue. One of the best known attempts to understand it is the Schelling model, which considers two types of agents that relocate whenever a transfer…
Human development has far-reaching impacts on the surface of the globe. The transformation of natural land cover occurs in different forms and urban growth is one of the most eminent transformative processes. We analyze global land cover…