Related papers: Observing cities as a complex system
The world is witnessing a period of extreme growth and urbanization; cities in the 21st century became nerve centers creating economic opportunities and cultural values which make cities grow exponentially. With this rapid urban population…
The dynamics of urban systems can be understood from an evolutionary perspective, in some sense extending biological and cultural evolution. Models for systems of cities implementing elementary evolutionary processes remain however to be…
Do cities have just one or several centers? Studies performing radial or monocentric analyses of cities are usually criticised by researchers stating that cities are actually polycentric, and this has been well known for a long time.…
The things surrounding us vary dramatically, which implies that there are far more small things than large ones, e.g., far more small cities than large ones in the world. This dramatic variation is often referred to as fractal or scaling.…
Intensive development of urban systems creates a number of challenges for urban planners and policy makers in order to maintain sustainable growth. Running efficient urban policies requires meaningful urban metrics, which could quantify…
The growing need for affordable and accessible higher education is a major global challenge for the 21st century. Consequently, there is a need to develop a deeper understanding of the functionality and taxonomy of universities and colleges…
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'…
What people buy is an important aspect or view of lifestyles. Studying people's shopping patterns in different urban regions can not only provide valuable information for various commercial opportunities, but also enable a better…
Ecosystems and other naturally resilient systems exhibit allometric scaling in the distribution of sizes of their elements. In this paper we define an allometry inspired scaling indicator for cities that is a first step towards quantifying…
Numerous urban indicators scale with population in a power law across cities, but whether the cross-sectional scaling law is applicable to the temporal growth of individual cities is unclear. Here we first find two paradoxical scaling…
During the last years, the new science of municipalities has been established as a fertile quantitative approach to systematically understand the urban phenomena. One of its main pillars is the proposition that urban systems display…
Cities are centers for the integration of capital and incubators of invention, and attracting venture capital (VC) is of great importance for cities to advance in innovative technology and business models towards a sustainable and…
The production of waste as a consequence of human activities is one of the most fundamental challenges facing our society and global ecological systems. Waste generation is rapidly increasing, with corresponding shifts in the structure of…
Urban development is shaped by historical, geographical, and economic factors, presenting challenges for planners in understanding urban form. This study models commute flows across multiple U.S. cities, uncovering consistent patterns in…
Agglomeration economies drive urban growth at different spatial scales by enabling productivity gains, knowledge spillovers, and shared inputs among proximate firms and amenities. To develop a unified science of cities it is thus important…
Urban outputs often scale superlinearly with city population. A difficulty in understanding the mechanism of this phenomenon is that different outputs differ considerably in their scaling behaviors. Here, we formulate a physics-based model…
In real-world applications, observations are often constrained to a small fraction of a system. Such spatial subsampling can be caused by the inaccessibility or the sheer size of the system, and cannot be overcome by longer sampling.…
In the last decades, the notion that cities are in a state of equilibrium with a centralised organisation has given place to the viewpoint of cities in disequilibrium and organised from bottom to up. In this perspective, cities are evolving…
Urbanization is a phenomenon of concern for planning and public health: projections are difficult because of policy changes and natural events, and indicators are multiple. There are previous studies of development that used fractals, but…
There is a contradiction at the heart of our current understanding of individual and collective mobility patterns. On one hand, a highly influential stream of literature on human mobility driven by analyses of massive empirical datasets…