A worldwide model for boundaries of urban settlements
arXiv:1711.06332 · doi:10.1098/rsos.180468
Abstract
The shape of urban settlements plays a fundamental role in their sustainable planning. Properly defining the boundaries of cities is challenging and remains an open problem in the Science of Cities. Here, we propose a worldwide model to define urban settlements beyond their administrative boundaries through a bottom-up approach that takes into account geographical biases intrinsically associated with most societies around the world, and reflected in their different regional growing dynamics. The generality of the model allows to study the scaling laws of cities at all geographical levels: countries, continents, and the entire world. Our definition of cities is robust and holds to one of the most famous results in Social Sciences: Zipf's law. According to our results, the largest cities in the world are not in line with what was recently reported by the United Nations. For example, we find that the largest city in the world is an agglomeration of several small settlements close to each other, connecting three large settlements: Alexandria, Cairo, and Luxor. Our definition of cities opens the doors to the study of the economy of cities in a systematic way independently of arbitrary definitions that employ administrative boundaries.
References in corpus (20)
- Power-law distributions in empirical data
- Constructing cities, deconstructing scaling laws
- A small-world of weak ties provides optimal global integration of self-similar modules in functional brain networks
- Laws of Population Growth
- Modeling Urban Growth Patterns with Correlated Percolation
- How congestion shapes cities: from mobility patterns to scaling
- Rank-Ordering Statistics of Extreme Events: Application to the Distribution of Large Earthquakes
- Large cities are less green
- Superlinear Scaling for Innovation in Cities
- Cities and Regions in Britain through hierarchical percolation
- MetaZipf. (Re)producing knowledge about city size distributions
- 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
- Rural to urban population density scaling of crime and property transactions in English and Welsh Parliamentary Constituencies
- Distance weighted city growth
- The size distribution, scaling properties and spatial organization of urban clusters: a global and regional perspective
- Spatially distributed social complex networks
- The light pollution as a surrogate for urban population of the US cities
- Space-time correlations in urban sprawl
- A worldwide model for boundaries of urban settlements