Policy: Urban physics

Abstract

Urban physics Cities are complex environments. Planning interventions that borrow principles from theoretical physics could help to improve peoples' lives.

New Insights into Rental Housing Markets across the United States: Web Scraping and Analyzing Craigslist Rental Listings

“…Planners must understand these tools to help ground-in urban theory and empirical research-the growing urban big data literature being generated in these other fields that have increasingly turned their attention to cities (cf. Bettencourt and West 2010;Bettencourt 2013;Pollock 2016). Yet most importantly, real-time Craigslist data in particular fill a pressing need for planners to measure local-scale rental markets-which evolve quicker than 5-year census rolling averages and data release delaysto understand local conditions, advocate for realistic FMRs, and proactively address emerging affordability challenges.…”

Sustainability for Shrinking Cities

“…The physical configuration of the environment (e.g., topography, transportation corridors) can play a key role in the flow of human and commercial capitals [15]. For example, zoning in cities is determined at the municipal scale by zoning regulations, but is also affected by business interests and national economies [36].…”

“…The heterogeneity, or patchiness, in cities is the basis for the nested adaptive cycles of panarchy that maintain the gradients driving transitions to sustainable trajectories in shrinking cities. Further, city growth rates are dependent upon the size of a city, and as urban social-ecological systems, are influenced by hierarchical, historic and generally site-specific dynamics that are often random, differentiating cities from the straightforward development pattern of well-understood physical systems [15]. For example, the growth of cities in the southeastern United States has been shown to be dependent upon mean household income, and the percentage of the population of a city with a college degree [37].…”

“…Many researchers utilize a complex systems approach for sustainable cities which is applicable to a dynamic city (e.g., [15]). Although the same theories and frameworks apply to a range of urban dynamics, a shrinking city will have different challenges than growing cities in getting to sustainable trajectories.…”

“…As a consequence, much of what we know about cities is focused on how they grow and take shape [2,3], the strains that their growth puts on city infrastructure [4,5], the consequences for human and other faunal-floral inhabitants of these cities and their surroundings [1,[6][7][8][9][10][11], and governance which can either exacerbate or ease these transitions [12][13][14][15]. Indeed, political and economic incentives provide a powerful motivation for continuous growth [16].…”