We propose a bare-bones stochastic model that takes into account both the geographical distribution of people within a country and their complex network of connections. The model, which is designed to give rise to a scale-free network of social conne
ctions and to visually resemble the geographical spread seen in satellite pictures of the Earth at night, gives rise to a power-law distribution for the ranking of cities by population size (but for the largest cities) and reflects the notion that highly connected individuals tend to live in highly populated areas. It also yields some interesting insights regarding Gibrats law for the rates of city growth (by population size), in partial support of the findings in a recent analysis of real data [Rozenfeld et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 105, 18702 (2008)]. The model produces a nontrivial relation between city population and city population density and a superlinear relationship between social connectivity and city population, both of which seem quite in line with real data.
An important issue in the study of cities is defining a metropolitan area, as different definitions affect the statistical distribution of urban activity. A commonly employed method of defining a metropolitan area is the Metropolitan Statistical Area
s (MSA), based on rules attempting to capture the notion of city as a functional economic region, and is constructed using experience. The MSA is time-consuming and is typically constructed only for a subset (few hundreds) of the most highly populated cities. Here, we introduce a new method to designate metropolitan areas, denoted the City Clustering Algorithm (CCA). The CCA is based on spatial distributions of the population at a fine geographic scale, defining a city beyond the scope of its administrative boundaries. We use the CCA to examine Gibrats law of proportional growth, postulating that the mean and standard deviation of the growth rate of cities are constant, independent of city size. We find that the mean growth rate of a cluster utilizing the CCA exhibits deviations from Gibrats law, and that the standard deviation decreases as a power-law with respect to the city size. The CCA allows for the study of the underlying process leading to these deviations, shown to arise from the existence of long-range spatial correlations in the population growth. These results have socio-political implications, such as those pertaining to the location of new economic development in cities of varied size.
Self-similarity is a property of fractal structures, a concept introduced by Mandelbrot and one of the fundamental mathematical results of the 20th century. The importance of fractal geometry stems from the fact that these structures were recognized
in numerous examples in Nature, from the coexistence of liquid/gas at the critical point of evaporation of water, to snowflakes, to the tortuous coastline of the Norwegian fjords, to the behavior of many complex systems such as economic data, or the complex patterns of human agglomeration. Here we review the recent advances in self-similarity of complex networks and its relation to transport, diffusion, percolations and other topological properties such us degree distribution, modularity, and degree-degree correlations.
