Rapid worldwide urbanization is at once the main cause and, potentially, the main solution to global sustainable development challenges. The growth of cities is typically associated with increases in socioeconomic productivity, but it also creates strong inequalities. Despite a growing body of evidence characterizing these heterogeneities in developed urban areas, not much is known systematically about their most extreme forms in developing cities and their consequences for sustainability. Here, we characterize the general patterns of income and access to services in a large number of developing cities, with an emphasis on an extensive, high-resolution analysis of the urban areas of Brazil and South Africa. We use detailed census data to construct sustainable development indices in hundreds of thousands of neighborhoods and show that their statistics are scale-dependent and point to the critical role of large cities in creating higher average incomes and greater access to services within their national context. We then quantify the general statistical trajectory toward universal basic service provision at different scales to show that it is characterized by varying levels of inequality, with initial increases in access being typically accompanied by growing disparities over characteristic spatial scales. These results demonstrate how extensions of these methods to other goals and data can be used over time and space to produce a simple but general quantitative assessment of progress toward internationally agreed sustainable development goals.neighborhoods | slums | urban services | spatial correlations | inequality T he current worldwide growth of cities presents at once an unprecedented historical opportunity for universal socioeconomic development and an immense challenge to global sustainability (1, 2). The mechanisms that generate improved living conditions and economic growth in cities-and that typically also increase overall energy and resource consumption-are still only partially understood (1-5) and remain hard to disentangle.Many recent studies have emphasized the environmental and geophysical adverse consequences of an increasing proportion of the planet's population living in cities and of the acceleration of this transformation in recent decades (6-8). The type and scope of these impacts vary but include air and water pollution, land-cover change, loss of natural habitats, strain on water resources, higher demand for energy, and rising greenhouse gas emissions (1,8,9).Conversely, the positive correlation between urbanization and many important dimensions of human development has also become increasingly clear. At the national level, the association between higher levels of urbanization and per capita economic productivity has been clear for some time (2). More recently, as city-scale data have become available, evidence has emerged for broader relationships between urbanization and better health, education, longer lifespans, and greater access to basic services, such as water or electricity, at lower...
To investigate the dynamics of social networks and the formation and evolution of online communities in response to extreme events, we collected three datasets from Twitter shortly before and after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. We find that while almost all users increased their online activity after the earthquake, Japanese speakers, who are assumed to be more directly affected by the event, expanded the network of people they interact with to a much higher degree than English speakers or the global average. By investigating the evolution of communities, we find that the behavior of joining or quitting a community is far from random: users tend to stay in their current status and are less likely to join new communities from solitary or shift to other communities from their current community. While non-Japanese speakers did not change their conversation topics significantly after the earthquake, nearly all Japanese users changed their conversations to earthquake-related content. This study builds a systematic framework for investigating human behaviors under extreme events with online social network data and our findings on the dynamics of networks and communities may provide useful insight for understanding how patterns of social interaction are influenced by extreme events.
The broader global community is navigating evolving climate risks, rapid energy transitions, and the growing recognition that sustainable future pathways will require fundamental transformations in our collective management of socio-environmental systems (de Vos et al.
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