The systematic structure and predictability of urban business diversity

Abstract

Understanding cities is central to addressing major global challenges from climate and health to economic resilience. Although increasingly perceived as fundamental socio-economic units, the detailed fabric of urban economic activities is only now accessible to comprehensive analyses with the availability of large datasets. Here, we study abundances of business categories across U.S. metropolitan statistical areas to investigate how diversity of economic activities depends on city size. A universal structure common to all cities is revealed, manifesting self-similarity in internal economic structure as well as aggregated metrics (GDP, patents, crime). A derivation is presented that explains universality and the observed empirical distribution. The model incorporates a generalized preferential attachment process with ceaseless introduction of new business types. Combined with scaling analyses for individual categories, the theory quantitatively predicts how individual business types systematically change rank with city size, thereby providing a quantitative means for estimating their expected abundances as a function of city size. These results shed light on processes of economic differentiation with scale, suggesting a general structure for the growth of national economies as integrated urban systems.

Press embargo in place until publication

References in corpus (4)

• The Building Blocks of Economic Complexity
• The Product Space Conditions the Development of Nations
• Invention as a Combinatorial Process: Evidence from U.S. Patents
• The hypothesis of urban scaling: formalization, implications and challenges

Cited by in corpus (24)

• City size and the spreading of COVID-19 in Brazil
• From global scaling to the dynamics of individual cities
• Computational Socioeconomics
• Explaining the Prevalence, Scaling and Variance of Urban Phenomena
• Uncovering the socioeconomic facets of human mobility
• Morphology of travel routes and the organization of cities
• Small cities face greater impact from automation
• Urbanization and Economic Complexity
• Technological novelty profile and invention's future impact
• Rural to urban population density scaling of crime and property transactions in English and Welsh Parliamentary Constituencies
• The Economic Complexity of US Metropolitan Areas
• Understanding the mesoscopic scaling patterns within cities
• A common trajectory recapitulated by urban economies
• Long-run dynamics of the U.S. patent classification system
• On the relation between Transversal and Longitudinal Scaling in Cities
• Unveiling Relationships Between Crime and Property in England and Wales Via Density Scale-Adjusted Metrics and Network Tools
• Skill dependencies uncover nested human capital
• Impact of natural disasters on consumer behavior: case of the 2017 El Nino phenomenon in Peru
• Estimating the drivers of urban economic complexity and their connection to economic performance
• Scaling Laws for Function Diversity and Specialization Across Socioeconomic and Biological Complex Systems
• Spatial concentration and temporal regularities in crime
• Flux of information in scale-free networks
• Hamiltonian Modeling of Macro-Economic Urban Dynamics
• Industrial Topics in Urban Labor System