Related papers: Observing cities as a complex system
The study of the properties and structure of a city's road network has for many years been the focus of much work, as has the mathematical modelling of the location of its retail activity and of the emergence of clustering in retail…
This chapter examines the possibility to analyze and compare human activities in an urban environment based on the detection of mobile phone usage patterns. Thanks to an unprecedented collection of counter data recording the number of…
We develop a "multifocal" approach to reveal spatial dissimilarities in cities, from the most local scale to the metropolitan one. Think for instance of a statistical variable that may be measured at different scales, eg ethnic group…
The growth of mobile sensor technologies have made it possible for city councils to understand peoples' behaviour in urban spaces which could help to reduce stress around the city. We present a quantitative approach to convey a collective…
Understanding urban mobility requires models that capture how people interact with and navigate the built environment. We present a scalable, generalizable agent-based framework in which daily schedules emerge from the interplay between…
We investigated the socioeconomic scaling behavior of all cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants in the Netherlands and found significant superlinear scaling of gross urban product with population size. Of these cities, 22 major cities…
Cities are inherently dynamic. Interesting patterns of behavior typically manifest at several key areas of a city over multiple temporal resolutions. Studying these patterns can greatly help a variety of experts ranging from city planners…
We investigate the socioeconomic urban scaling behavior in Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands. In the case of Denmark we examine the scaling of larger cities, municipalities within the Copenhagen agglomeration, and municipalities in…
Emergence of self-similarity in hierarchical community structures is ubiquitous in complex systems. Yet, there is a dearth of universal quantification and general principles describing the formation of such structures. Here, we discover…
This paper investigates the relationship between smart city initiatives and evolving urbanization trends in the United States. The research addresses the critical issue of rapid urban growth in the U.S. and explores how innovations within…
We described the average traffic congestion in several populous cities around the world from a new concept, namely landscape percolation. The ratio of the residential area size to road width is a fundamental parameter that controls the…
In this paper we revisit the concept of mobility entropy. Over time, the structure of spatial interactions among urban centres tends to become more complex and evolves from centralised models to more scattered origin and destination…
Many cities are expanding in areas with scarce rainfall and limited water retention capacity, and are also becoming elongated and sprawled, making it harder to deliver services. This study quantifies the impact of urban form on access to…
Crime rates per capita are used virtually everywhere to rank and compare cities. However, their usage relies on a strong linear assumption that crime increases at the same pace as the number of people in a region. In this paper, we…
The relationships between diversity, productivity and scale determine much of the structure and robustness of complex biological and social systems. While arguments for the link between specialization and productivity are common, diversity…
The continuous evolution of cities poses significant challenges in terms of managing and understanding their complex dynamics. With the increasing demand for transparency and the growing availability of open urban data, it has become…
Urban systems are intrinsically complex, involving different dimensions and scales, and consequently various approaches and scientific disciplines. In that context, urban simulation models have been coined as essential for the construction…
The city has proven to be the most successful form of human agglomeration and provides wide employment opportunities for its dwellers. As advances in robotics and artificial intelligence revive concerns about the impact of automation on…
Given that a group of cities follows a scaling law connecting urban population with socio-economic or infrastructural metrics (transversal scaling), should we expect that each city would follow the same behavior over time (longitudinal…
Are there multiple equilibria in the spatial economy? This paper develops a unified framework that integrates systems of cities and regional models to address this question within a general geographic space. A key feature is the endogenous…