Related papers: Universal roughness and the dynamics of urban expa…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
Urban land growth presents a major sustainability challenge, yet its growth patterns and dynamics remain unclear. We quantified urban land evolution by analyzing its statistical distribution in 14 regions and countries over 29 years. The…
Urban expansion fronts display a robust local roughness exponent together with strongly dispersed growth and nonuniversal dynamic exponents. We show that this coexistence can arise from a disorder-controlled crossover in projected-front…
A good understanding of cities is crucial to implement urban planning policies leading to social and economic sustainability and an efficient use of resources. While urban concentration has been associated with both positive and negative…
The emerging field of the Science of Cities has unveiled previously undiscovered facets of urban life. Contrary to the expectation of chaotic behaviour influenced solely by cultural and geographic factors, cities globally exhibit universal…
We present a broad, phenomenological picture of the distribution of the length of open space linear segments, $l$, derived from maps of 36 cities in 14 different countries. By scaling the Zipf plot of $l$, we obtain two master curves for a…
\begin{abstract} In this Letter we follow the asymptotic spatial correlation of buildings' heights $G_{\infty}(r)$ in the whole of the Netherlands \cite{bag3d}, which comprises $\approx 10,000,000$ buildings, for the purpose of recovering…
Urban scaling laws relate socio-economic, behavioral, and physical variables to the population size of cities and allow for a new paradigm of city planning, and an understanding of urban resilience and economies. Independently of culture…
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…
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…
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…
Understanding scaling relations of social and environmental attributes of urban systems is necessary for effectively managing cities. Urban scaling theory (UST) has assumed that population density scales positively with city size. We…
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…
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…
Urban population density always follows the exponential distribution and can be described with Clark's model. Because of this, the spatial distribution of urban population used to be regarded as non-fractal pattern. However, Clark's model…
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…
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…