Related papers: Cities cluster into growth regimes that propagate …
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 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…
Challenges due to the rapid urbanization of the world -- especially in emerging countries -- range from an increasing dependence on energy, to air pollution, socio-spatial inequalities, environmental and sustainability issues. Modelling the…
How are economic activities linked to geographic locations? To answer this question, we use a data-driven approach that builds on the information about location, ownership and economic activities of the world's 3,000 largest firms and their…
The city is a complex system that evolves through its inherent social and economic interactions. Mediating the movements of people and resources, urban street networks offer a spatial footprint of these activities; consequently their…
In recent decades the world has experienced rates of urban growth unparalleled in any other period of history and this growth is shaping the environment in which an increasing proportion of us live. In this paper we use a longitudinal…
Although the cluster theory literature is bountiful in economics and regional science, there is still a lack of understanding of how the geographical scales of analysis (neighbourhood, city, region) relate to one another and impact the…
The recent availability of data for cities has allowed scientists to exhibit scalings which present themselves in the form of a power-law dependence with population of various socio-economical and structural indicators. We propose here a…
The relationship between urban form and function is a complex challenge that can be examined from multiple perspectives. In this study, we propose a method to characterize the urban function of U.S. metropolitan areas by analyzing trip…
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…
Diversified economies are critical for cities to sustain their growth and development, but they are also costly because diversification often requires expanding a city's capability base. We analyze how cities manage this trade-off by…
Understanding how urban systems and traffic dynamics co-evolve is crucial for advancing sustainable and resilient cities. However, their bidirectional causal relationships remain underexplored due to challenges of simultaneously inferring…
For centuries, national economies created wealth by engaging in international trade and production. The resulting international supply networks not only increase wealth for countries, but also create systemic risk: economic shocks,…
The spatial heterogeneity of cities -- the uneven distribution of population and activities -- is fundamental to urban dynamics and related to critical issues such as infrastructure overload, housing affordability, and social inequality.…
Much of the analysis of economic growth has focused on the study of aggregate output. Here, we deviate from this tradition and look instead at the structure of output embodied in the network connecting countries to the products that they…
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…
Urban economic vitality is a crucial indicator of a city's long-term growth potential, comprising key metrics such as the annual number of new companies and the population employed. However, modeling urban economic vitality remains…
We analyze export data aggregated at world global level of 219 classes of products over a period of 39 years. Our main goal is to set up a dynamical model to identify and quantify plausible mechanisms by which the evolutions of the various…
This paper investigates how economic shocks propagate and amplify through the input-output network connecting industrial sectors in developed economies. We study alternative models of diffusion on networks and we calibrate them using…
Scaling has been proposed as a powerful tool to analyze the properties of complex systems, and in particular for cities where it describes how various properties change with population. The empirical study of scaling on a wide range of…