Diffusive resettlement: irreversible urban transitions in closed systems

Abstract

We propose a phenomenological non-equilibrium framework for modelling the evolution of cities which describes the intra-urban resettlement as an irreversible diffusive process. We validate this framework using the actual migration data for the Australian capital cities. With respect to the residential relocation, the population is shown to be composed of two distinct groups, exhibiting different relocation frequencies. In the context of the developed framework, these groups can be interpreted as two components of a binary mixture, each with its own diffusive relaxation time. Using this approach, we obtain long-term predictions of the cities' spatial structure, which defines their equilibrium population distribution.

35 pages, 13 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Understanding individual human mobility patterns
• The statistical physics of Cities
• The Polycentric Dynamics of Melbourne and Sydney: Suburb attractiveness divides a city at the home ownership level

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• The Polycentric Dynamics of Melbourne and Sydney: Suburb attractiveness divides a city at the home ownership level
• Revealing configurational attractors in the evolution of modern Australian and US cities