Related papers: The Backbone of a City
Increasing evidence suggests that cities are complex systems, with structural and dynamical features responsible for a broad spectrum of emerging phenomena. Here we use a unique data set of human flows and couple it with information on the…
Interventions of central, top-down planning are serious limitations to the possibility of modelling the dynamics of cities. An example is the city of Paris (France), which during the 19th century experienced large modifications supervised…
We investigate the behavior of extended urban traffic networks within the framework of percolation theory by using real and synthetic traffic data. Our main focus shifts from the statistical properties of the cluster size distribution…
We analyze the congestion data collected by a GPS device company (TomTom) for almost 300 urban areas in the world. Using simple scaling arguments and data fitting we show that congestion during peak hours in large cities grows essentially…
Lifestyles are a valuable model for understanding individuals' physical and mental lives, comparing social groups, and making recommendations for improving people's lives. In this paper, we examine and compare lifestyle behaviors of people…
Models of street networks underlie research in urban travel behavior, accessibility, design patterns, and morphology. These models are commonly defined as planar, meaning they can be represented in two dimensions without any underpasses or…
Recent development of network structure analysis shows that it plays an important role in characterizing complex system of many branches of sciences. Different from previous network centrality measures, this paper proposes the notion of…
Nowadays, 23% of the world population lives in multi-million cities. In these metropolises, criminal activity is much higher and violent than in either small cities or rural areas. Thus, understanding what factors influence urban crime in…
The spatial arrangement of urban hubs and centers and how individuals interact with these centers is a crucial problem with many applications ranging from urban planning to epidemiology. We utilize here in an unprecedented manner the large…
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…
This paper explores the relationship between the inner economical structure of communities and their population distribution through a rank-rank analysis of official data, along statistical physics ideas within two techniques. The data is…
In complex networks a common task is to identify the most important or "central" nodes. There are several definitions, often called centrality measures, which often lead to different results. Here we study extensively correlations between…
There are many benefits and costs that come from people and firms clustering together in space. Agglomeration economies, in particular, are the manifestation of centripetal forces that make larger cities disproportionately more wealthy than…
In transportation, communication, social and other real complex networks, some critical edges act a pivotal part in controlling the flow of information and maintaining the integrity of the structure. Due to the importance of critical edges…
Streets are large, diverse, and used for several (and possibly conflicting) transport modalities as well as social and cultural activities. Proper planning is essential and requires data. Manually fabricating data that represent streets…
How does transport cost affect the spatial organization of economic activities? This study develops a theoretical framework that distinguishes between two types of dispersion forces in spatial models: "local" dispersion forces acting within…
Street networks may be planned according to clear organizing principles or they may evolve organically through accretion, but their configurations and orientations help define a city's spatial logic and order. Measures of entropy reveal a…
In this paper, we investigate the statistical features of the weighted international-trade network. By finding the maximum weight spanning trees for this network we make the extraction of the truly relevant connections forming the network's…
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…
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…