Urban Scaling


Book Description

Urban allometry empirically describes how “things”, for example crime, GDP, emissions, energy use, area, street length, housing prices, etc. change in cities when their size, in terms of population, increases. Urban scaling is a relatively recent area of urban science, investigating how measurable characteristics of cities vary with their sizes. This book addresses this relatively novel but highly debated topic within urban studies and geography. It presents many results, techniques, methods, and reflections on urban scaling and allometry. The sections are organized into different sub- areas such as socio- economic, infrastructural or environmental outputs, so that there is a broad organization of the findings into recognizable sub- domains. The book is particularly timely as it is becoming increasingly urgent and necessary to understand the pro and cons of different city sizes and therefore to plan policies accordingly. The book is especially interesting from a theoretical perspective because it presents the latest developments and achievements in the field, which will help to highlight potential universal rules across cities and regions. This book will benefit researchers in urban science, and scholars entering the field from various disciplines, such as geography, sociology, economics, mathematics, physics, or urban and regional planning. It will also find an audience among practitioners and policymakers. Chapters 2, 13 and 31 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.




Scale


Book Description

"This is science writing as wonder and as inspiration." —The Wall Street Journal Wall Street Journal From one of the most influential scientists of our time, a dazzling exploration of the hidden laws that govern the life cycle of everything from plants and animals to the cities we live in. Visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks. The term “complexity” can be misleading, however, because what makes West’s discoveries so beautiful is that he has found an underlying simplicity that unites the seemingly complex and diverse phenomena of living systems, including our bodies, our cities and our businesses. Fascinated by aging and mortality, West applied the rigor of a physicist to the biological question of why we live as long as we do and no longer. The result was astonishing, and changed science: West found that despite the riotous diversity in mammals, they are all, to a large degree, scaled versions of each other. If you know the size of a mammal, you can use scaling laws to learn everything from how much food it eats per day, what its heart-rate is, how long it will take to mature, its lifespan, and so on. Furthermore, the efficiency of the mammal’s circulatory systems scales up precisely based on weight: if you compare a mouse, a human and an elephant on a logarithmic graph, you find with every doubling of average weight, a species gets 25% more efficient—and lives 25% longer. Fundamentally, he has proven, the issue has to do with the fractal geometry of the networks that supply energy and remove waste from the organism’s body. West’s work has been game-changing for biologists, but then he made the even bolder move of exploring his work’s applicability. Cities, too, are constellations of networks and laws of scalability relate with eerie precision to them. Recently, West has applied his revolutionary work to the business world. This investigation has led to powerful insights into why some companies thrive while others fail. The implications of these discoveries are far-reaching, and are just beginning to be explored. Scale is a thrilling scientific adventure story about the elemental natural laws that bind us together in simple but profound ways. Through the brilliant mind of Geoffrey West, we can envision how cities, companies and biological life alike are dancing to the same simple, powerful tune.




Scaling Urban Environmental Challenges


Book Description

Think globally, act locally emphasizes the importance of scale in dealing with environmental challenges, but not how to factor it in. This major new book focuses on the spatial dimensions of urban environmental burdens, showing how important it is to take these into account when pursuing environmental justice and good governance - whether in the context of the sanitary risks of slum living, the pollution of uncontrolled industrialization and motorization, or the enormous ecological footprints of affluent urban lifestyles. Written by leading experts in the fields of urban development and environmental planning, the book reviews the urban environmental shifts that have shaped todays challenges, and examines conditions and problems in the urban centres of low-, middle- and high-income countries. Case studies address such economically diverse cities as Accra, New Delhi, Mexico City and Manchester, while thematic chapters explore issues including water, sanitation and transportation. The book concludes by exploring and analysing different scales of governance. The editors argue that we should not rely solely on local governance to address local burdens like poor sanitation, nor depend only on global governance for global challenges such as greenhouse gas emissions, but that scale is crucial in both understanding the problems and devising successful responses. Published with UNU-IAS and IIED.




Synergetic Cities: Information, Steady State and Phase Transition


Book Description

The book offers a novel approach to the study of the complex dynamics of cities. It is based on (1) Synergetics as a science of cooperation and selforganization, (2) information theory including semantic and pragmatic aspects, and optimization principles, (3) a theory of steady state maintenance, and of (4) phase transition, i.e. qualitative changes of structure or behavior. From this novel theoretical vantage point, the book addresses particularly three issues that stand at the core of current discourse on cities: Urban Scaling, Smart Cities and City Planning. An important consequence of “the 21st century as the age of cities”, is that the study of cities currently attracts scientists from a variety of disciplines, ranging from physics, mathematics and computer science, through urban studies, architecture, planning and human geography, to economics, psychology, sociology, public administration and more. The book is thus likely to attract scholars, researchers and students of these research domains, of complexity theories of cities, as well as of general complexity theory. In addition, it is directed also to practitioners of urbanism, city planning and urban design.




Introduction to Urban Science


Book Description

A novel, integrative approach to cities as complex adaptive systems, applicable to issues ranging from innovation to economic prosperity to settlement patterns. Human beings around the world increasingly live in urban environments. In Introduction to Urban Science, Luis Bettencourt takes a novel, integrative approach to understanding cities as complex adaptive systems, claiming that they require us to frame the field of urban science in a way that goes beyond existing theory in such traditional disciplines as sociology, geography, and economics. He explores the processes facilitated by and, in many cases, unleashed for the first time by urban life through the lenses of social heterogeneity, complex networks, scaling, circular causality, and information. Though the idea that cities are complex adaptive systems has become mainstream, until now those who study cities have lacked a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding cities and urbanization, for generating useful and falsifiable predictions, and for constructing a solid body of empirical evidence so that the discipline of urban science can continue to develop. Bettencourt applies his framework to such issues as innovation and development across scales, human reasoning and strategic decision-making, patterns of settlement and mobility and their influence on socioeconomic life and resource use, inequality and inequity, biodiversity, and the challenges of sustainable development in both high- and low-income nations. It is crucial, says Bettencourt, to realize that cities are not "zero-sum games" and that knowledge, human cooperation, and collective action can build a better future.




Theories and Models of Urbanization


Book Description

This book provides a thorough discussion about fundamental questions regarding urban theories and modeling. It is a curated collection of contributions to a workshop held in Paris on October 12th and 13th 2017 at the Institute of Complex Systems by the team of ERC GeoDiverCity. There are several chapters conveying the answers given by single authors to problems of conceptualization and modeling and others in which scholars reply to their conception and question them. Even, the chapters transcribing keynote presentations were rewritten according to contributions from the respective discussions. The result is a complete “state of the art” of what is our knowledge about urban processes and their possible formalization.




New Urban Spaces


Book Description

The urban condition is today being radically transformed. Urban restructuring is accelerating, new urban spaces are being consolidated, and new forms of urbanization are crystallizing. In New Urban Spaces, Neil Brenner argues that understanding these mutations of urban life requires not only concrete research, but new theories of urbanization. To this end, Brenner proposes an approach that breaks with inherited conceptions of the urban as a bounded settlement unit-the city or the metropolis-and explores the multiscalar constitution and periodic rescaling of the capitalist urban fabric. Drawing on critical geopolitical economy and spatialized approaches to state theory, Brenner offers a paradigmatic account of how rescaling processes are transforming inherited formations of urban space and their variegated consequences for emergent patterns and pathways of urbanization. The book also advances an understanding of critical urban theory as radically revisable: key urban concepts must be continually reinvented in relation to the relentlessly mutating worlds of urbanization they aspire to illuminate.




TRAC 2015


Book Description

The 2015 TRAC proceedings feature a selection of 14 papers summing up some of the key sessions presented at the conference held at the University of Leicester in March 2015, which drew over 180 delegates of 17 nationalities from a variety of universities, museums, and research institutions in the UK, Europe, and North America. As this conference marked the 25th anniversary of TRAC, the volume opens with a preface commemorating the last 25 years with an eye toward the future direction of both conference and community. The proceedings begin with Dr Andrew Gardner’s keynote paper on the topic of ‘Debating Roman Imperialism: Critique, Construct, Repeat?’. This is followed by an array of papers with topics ranging in geographic scope and period, from small finds in early Roman Britain to bathing practices Late Antique North Africa, and from the investigation of deviant burials to the application of urban scaling theory in Roman contexts. Because of this diversity the volume is not broken into specific sections, however, papers with similar themes are grouped accordingly, allowing the text to flow and be read as a whole. The range of contributing authors is also of note, as papers were submitted by PhD students, post-doctoral researchers, and university faculty, all helping to make the 25th anniversary of this series one that continues to emphasis and reflect the aims of TRAC, both as a conference and as a conduit for exploring more theory-driven approaches to the Roman past.




Microeconomic Modeling in Urban Science


Book Description

Microeconomic Modeling in Urban Science proposes an interdisciplinary framework for the analysis of urban systems. It portrays agents as rational beings modeled under the framework of random utility behavior and interacting in a complex market of location auctions, location externalities, agglomeration economies, transport accessibility attributes, and planning regulations and incentives. Francisco Javier Martinez Concha considers the optimal planning of cities as he explores interactions between citizens and between citizens and firms, the mesoscopic agglomeration of firms and the segregation of agents' socioeconomic clusters, and the emergence of city-level scale laws. Its unified model of city life is relevant to micro-, meso- and macro-scale interactions. - Presents a unified, coherent and realistic framework able to simulate complete urban systems - Describes the use of discrete–choice and stochastic behavior models in the auction spatial-equilibrium market - Includes computing outputs from Cube-Land modeling using GIS




Industry 4.0 and Circular Economy


Book Description

How the marriage of Industry 4.0 and the Circular Economy can radically transform waste management—and our world Do we really have to make a choice between a wasteless and nonproductive world or a wasteful and ultimately self-destructive one? Futurist and world-renowned waste management scientist Antonis Mavropoulos and sustainable business developer and digital strategist Anders Nilsen respond with a ringing and optimistic “No!” They explore the Earth-changing potential of a happy (and wasteless) marriage between Industry 4.0 and a Circular Economy that could—with properly reshaped waste management practices—deliver transformative environmental, health, and societal benefits. This book is about the possibility of a brand-new world and the challenges to achieve it. The fourth industrial revolution has given us innovations including robotics, artificial intelligence, 3D-printing, and biotech. By using these technologies to advance the Circular Economy—where industry produces more durable materials and runs on its own byproducts—the waste management industry will become a central element of a more sustainable world and can ensure its own, but well beyond business as usual, future. Mavropoulos and Nilsen look at how this can be achieved—a wasteless world will require more waste management—and examine obstacles and opportunities such as demographics, urbanization, global warming, and the environmental strain caused by the rise of the global middle class. · Explore the new prevention, reduction, and elimination methods transforming waste management · Comprehend and capitalize on the business implications for the sector · Understand the theory via practical examples and case studies · Appreciate the social benefits of the new approach Waste-management has always been vital for the protection of health and the environment. Now it can become a crucial role model in showing how Industry 4.0 and the Circular Economy can converge to ensure flourishing, sustainable—and much brighter—future.