The Old and the New: Qualifying City Systems in the World with Classical Models and New Data

Cura, Robin; Cottineau, Clémentine; Swerts, Elfie; Ignazzi, Cosmo Antonio; Bretagnolle, Anne; Vacchiani-Marcuzzo, Céline; Pumain, Dénise

doi:10.1111/gean.12129

Cited by 28 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…The first part of this concluding chapter is a selection of salient points from our evolutionary theory of urban systems that are discussed in several of the chapters. As many of our results were already published (Pumain et al 2015;Cura et al 2017;Pumain & Reuillon 2017) 2 it was possible to confirm them, or to bring more different evidence or contradictory views. For each of these lively research questions, we report the convergent opinions that emerged from the topics discussed, as well as the open and even controversial perspectives for future work.…”

supporting

confidence: 52%

Conclusion: Perspectives on Urban Theories

Pumain¹,

Raimbault

2020

Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis

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At the end of the five years of work in our GeoDiverCity program 1 , we brought together a diversity of authors from different disciplines. Each person was invited to present an important question about the theories and models of urbanization. They are representative of a variety of currents in urban research. Rather than repeat here the contents of all chapters, we propose two ways to synthesize the scientific contributions of this book. In a first part we replace them in relation to a few principles that were experimented in our program, and in a second part we situate them with respect to a broader view of international literature on these topics.

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supporting

confidence: 52%

Conclusion: Perspectives on Urban Theories

Pumain¹,

Raimbault

2020

Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis

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“…Within the empirical literature committed to estimating the scaling power b , geographers and physicists focused mostly on attributes related to infrastructures, individual needs or social activities (Bettencourt et al ; Batty 2008a; Bettencourt ; Arcaute et al ; Bettencourt and Lobo ; Leitão et al ; Cottineau et al ). Besides, we should also remind that urban scaling laws are mostly used for the study of rank‐size population distributions and empirical tests of Zipf's law (e.g., Gabaix ; Eeckhout ; Tabuchi, Thisse, and Zeng ; Cura et al ). This is a related but distinct research topic where the focus is set on the self‐organization of cities into urban systems.…”

Section: Background Literature and Research Strategymentioning

confidence: 99%

Alonso and the Scaling of Urban Profiles

Delloye

Lemoy

Caruso

2019

Geographical Analysis

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How urban characteristics change with total population, their scaling behavior, has become an important research field since one needs to better understand the challenges of urban densification. Yet urban scaling research is largely disconnected from intra-urban structure, and this seriously limits its operationalization. In contrast, the monocentric model of Alonso provides a residential choice-based theory to urban density profiles. However, dedicated comparative static analyses do not completely solve how the model scales with population. This article bridges this gap by simultaneously introducing power laws for land, income and transport cost in the Alonso model. We show that the equilibrium urban structure of this augmented model matches recent empirical findings about the scaling of European population density profiles and satisfactorily represents European cities. This result is however not compatible with the observed scaling power of housing land profiles, and challenges current empirical understanding of wage and transport cost elasticities with population. Our results call for revisiting theories about land development and housing processes as well as the empirics of agglomeration benefits and transport costs.

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“…The comparability of many results about urban growth and distribution of city sizes is too often hampered because authors did not apply this geographical principle when defining and delineating properly the urban units they consider (see, for instance, in [15,16], or see in [17] for a full review). Systematic investigations were made recently after developing original harmonized databases on thousands of urban agglomerations over decades and even centuries in the GeoDiverCity project [13,18,19], including USA, Europe, and BRICS countries.…”

Section: Geographical Models Of Urban Growth Within Systems Of Citiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Empowering Urban Governance through Urban Science: Multi-Scale Dynamics of Urban Systems Worldwide

Raimbault

Denis²,

Pumain³

2020

Sustainability

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Cities are facing many sustainability issues in the context of the current global interdependency characterized by an economic uncertainty coupled to climate changes, which challenge their local policies aiming to better conciliate reasonable growth with livable urban environment. The urban dynamic models developed by the so-called “urban science” can provide a useful foundation for more sustainable urban policies. It implies that their proposals have been validated by correct observations of the diversity of situations in the world. However, international comparisons of the evolution of cities often produce unclear results because national territorial frameworks are not always in strict correspondence with the dynamics of urban systems. We propose to provide various compositions of systems of cities in order to better take into account the dynamic networking of cities that go beyond regional and national territorial boundaries. Different models conceived for explaining city size and urban growth distributions enable the establishing of a correspondence between urban trajectories when observed at the level of cities and systems of cities. We test the validity and representativeness of several dynamic models of complex urban systems and their variations across regions of the world, at the macroscopic scale of systems of cities. The originality of the approach resides in the way it considers spatial interaction and evolutionary path dependence as major features in the general behavior of urban entities. The models studied include diverse and complementary processes, such as economic exchanges, diffusion of innovations, and physical network flows. Complex systems dynamics is in principle unpredictable, but contextualizing it regarding demographic, income, and resource components may help in minimizing the forecasting errors. We use, among others, a new unique source correlating population and built-up footprint at world scale: the Global Human Settlement built-up areas (GHS-BU). Following the methodology and results already obtained in the European GeoDiverCity project, including USA, Europe, and BRICS countries, we complete them with this new dataset at world scale and different models. This research helps in further empirical testing of the hypotheses of the evolutionary theory of urban systems and partially revising them. We also suggest research directions towards the coupling of these models into a multi-scale model of urban growth.

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The Old and the New: Qualifying City Systems in the World with Classical Models and New Data

Cited by 28 publications

References 41 publications

Conclusion: Perspectives on Urban Theories

Conclusion: Perspectives on Urban Theories

Alonso and the Scaling of Urban Profiles

Empowering Urban Governance through Urban Science: Multi-Scale Dynamics of Urban Systems Worldwide

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