Spatio-Temporal Interurban Regularities in the Global South

Abstract

The reality of people’s lives has shifted from rural to urban areas, where an ever-increasing proportion of the world’s population lives. Providing infrastructure to serve these areas, especially in the Global South, is a key task of sustainable development. A deep understanding of the spatial arrangement and scales of these urban structures and their temporal evolution can help to develop innovative solutions to issues of energy, water, or transportation infrastructures. For this purpose, in this work we study the temporal evolution of urban built-up structures (Global Artificial Impervious Area) and population distributions (Global Human Settlement Population) in four regions of the Global South (Argentina, India, Egypt, and Nigeria). We qualitatively analyze regularity through the pair correlation function and subsequently identify typical scales within the different interurban systems. In doing so, we identify that especially the large settlement objects arrange themselves in a regular way and thus typical scales exist in urban systems. Thus, settlement objects are usually located about 20 to 40 km apart from each other. This information can be used to develop sustainable infrastructure concepts, for example for passenger transport between settlements.

Towards the Identification of Simple Mechanisms Describing the Development of Settlements

“…The important deduction from [13] is that regular patterns can be found ubiquitously within the investigated regions. For region of India, regularity can be found while analyzing all objects up to a population of 10 4 and above 10 5 inhabitants.…”

“…With the dependence of pattern distribution from time and size can be visualized in a contour diagram. A detailed description of this analysis, the derivation of system parameters and conclusions for infrastructural decision making can be found in [13].…”

“…The economically successful settlers are able to suppress weaker actors and even take over their property, leading to a regular distribution of equally sized ranches in A. Apart from theory, all three arrangement of settlements can be found in distributions of settlements in agriculturally dominated regions [10][11][12][13], suggesting that settlements could follow certain mechanisms, be they attractive, random or repulsive processes. An particularly interesting feature of these regions is the existence of regularities in settlement distributions.…”