Large cities are less green

Abstract

We study how urban quality evolves as a result of carbon dioxide emissions as urban agglomerations grow. We employ a bottom-up approach combining two unprecedented microscopic data on population and carbon dioxide emissions in the continental US. We first aggregate settlements that are close to each other into cities using the City Clustering Algorithm (CCA) defining cities beyond the administrative boundaries. Then, we use data on ${\mathrm{CO}}_2$ emissions at a fine geographic scale to determine the total emissions of each city. We find a superlinear scaling behavior, expressed by a power-law, between ${\mathrm{CO}}_2$ emissions and city population with average allometric exponent $\beta =1.46$ across all cities in the US. This result suggests that the high productivity of large cities is done at the expense of a proportionally larger amount of emissions compared to small cities. Furthermore, our results are substantially different from those obtained by the standard administrative definition of cities, i.e. Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA). Specifically, MSAs display isometric scaling emissions and we argue that this discrepancy is due to the overestimation of MSA areas. The results suggest that allometric studies based on administrative boundaries to define cities may suffer from endogeneity bias.

References in corpus (1)

• Laws of Population Growth

Cited by in corpus (30)

• Effects of changing population or density on urban carbon dioxide emissions
• How congestion shapes cities: from mobility patterns to scaling
• The statistical physics of Cities
• From global scaling to the dynamics of individual cities
• Is this scaling nonlinear?
• Computational Socioeconomics
• How does public opinion become extreme?
• Scaling: Lost in the smog
• Small cities face greater impact from automation
• The non-linear health consequences of living in larger cities
• Rich and Poor Cities in Europe. Urban Scaling to Mapping European Economic Convergence
• Human Mobility in Large Cities as a Proxy for Crime
• Scale-adjusted metrics for predicting the evolution of urban indicators and quantifying the performance of cities
• Critical factors for mitigating car traffic in cities
• Rural to urban population density scaling of crime and property transactions in English and Welsh Parliamentary Constituencies
• Human diffusion and city influence
• Constructing multi-level urban clusters based on population distributions and interactions
• Great cities look small
• The Central Role of Energy in the Urban Transition: Global Challenges for Sustainability
• The light pollution as a surrogate for urban population of the US cities
• Unveiling Relationships Between Crime and Property in England and Wales Via Density Scale-Adjusted Metrics and Network Tools
• Some recent advances in urban system science: models and data
• A worldwide model for boundaries of urban settlements
• Scaling Behavior of Public Procurement Activity
• The role of city size and urban metrics on crime modeling
• Evolving spatiotemporal patterns and urban scaling of deaths from external causes
• Hamiltonian Modeling of Macro-Economic Urban Dynamics
• The scaling of income inequality in cities
• Observing cities as a complex system
• Dynamics of racial segregation and gentrification in New York City