Related papers: On spatial systems of cities
Cities are living organisms. They are out of equilibrium, open systems that never stop developing and sometimes die. The local geography can be compared to a shell constraining its development. In brief, a city's current layout is a step in…
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…
Recent research in economic theory attempts to study optimal economic growth and spatial location of economic activity in a unified framework. So far, the key result of this literature - asymptotic convergence, even in the absence of…
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…
The amount of data that is being gathered about cities is increasing in size and specificity. However, despite this wealth of information, we still have little understanding of what really drives the processes behind urbanisation. In this…
Over the last decades, in disciplines as diverse as economics, geography, and complex systems, a perspective has arisen proposing that many properties of cities are quantitatively predictable due to agglomeration or scaling effects. Using…
Urban land cover doubled between 1985 and 2015, yet the spatial dynamics of urban form remain under-quantified, despite its importance for sustainability, infrastructure planning, and climate risk. Urban expansion is a non-equilibrium…
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…
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 presented model provides an explanation to several empirically observed phenomena in spatial economics. By representing the system as a complex network of fixed-size land areas connected by trade between harbored activities, city size…
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…
There is strong expectation that cities, across time, culture and level of development, share much in common in terms of their form and function. Recently, attempts to formalize mathematically these expectations have led to the hypothesis…
We introduce a model in which city populations grow at rates proportional to the area of their "sphere of influence", where the influence of a city depends on its population (to power \alpha) and distance from city (to power -\beta) and…
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…
Models of spatial firm competition assume that customers are distributed in space and transportation costs are associated with their purchases of products from a small number of firms that are also placed at definite locations. It has been…
Discrete choice models with social interactions or spillovers may exhibit multiple equilibria. This paper provides a systematic approach to enumerating them for a quantitative spatial model with discrete locations, social interactions, and…
Geopolitics is shaped by trade and borders. We develop a general-equilibrium model in which both are endogenously determined in a linear world. Their interaction rationalizes geopolitical outcomes that cannot be obtained when either trade…
Benchmarking and monitoring urban design and transport features is critical to achieving local and international health and sustainability goals. However, most urban indicator frameworks use coarse spatial scales that only allow…
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…
Understanding how size influences the internal characteristics of a system is a crucial concern across various fields. Concepts like scale invariance, universalities, and fractals are fundamental to this inquiry and find application in…