ﻻ يوجد ملخص باللغة العربية
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: Zipfs 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.
Defining an objective boundary for a city is a difficult problem, which remains to be solved by an effective method. Recent years, new methods for identifying urban boundary have been developed by means of spatial search techniques (e.g. CCA). Howeve
Urban theorists, social reformists and philosophers have considered the city as a living organism since Plato. However, despite extraordinary advancements in evolutionary biology, now being used to explain social and cultural phenomena, a proper scie
We model the spreading of a crisis by constructing a global economic network and applying the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) epidemic model with a variable probability of infection. The probability of infection depends on the strength of econom
Urban segregation of different communities, like blacks and whites in the USA, has been simulated by Ising-like models since Schelling 1971. This research was accompanied by a scientific segregation, with sociologists and physicists ignoring each oth
Human settlements on Earth are scattered in a multitude of shapes, sizes and spatial arrangements. These patterns are often not random but a result of complex geographical, cultural, economic and historical processes that have profound human and ecol