IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/phsmap/v382y2007i2p643-649.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Scaling laws and the modern city

Author

Listed:
  • Isalgue, Antonio
  • Coch, Helena
  • Serra, Rafael

Abstract

The inter-relations and the complexity of modern urban spaces are difficult to analyse in a way that allows improving living conditions or help to ascertain optimal decisions for saving energy or improving sustainability. Carefully designed decisions and guidelines might produce unexpected results because of particularities, or complex sets of reactions from residents or economic counterparts. Complexity tends to increase with size, such as when, for instance, services tend to concentrate in large agglomerations, and transportation needs take on critical importance. Complex systems such as living organisms are known to follow approximate relationships as scaling laws between the variables that describe them. Some of these kinds of relationships are tested in relation to modern developed urban spaces, in which it is possible to find a reasonable continuity with the types of scales seen in living organisms, and some preliminary conclusions are drawn.

Suggested Citation

  • Isalgue, Antonio & Coch, Helena & Serra, Rafael, 2007. "Scaling laws and the modern city," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 382(2), pages 643-649.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:382:y:2007:i:2:p:643-649
    DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2007.04.019
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437107003834
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.physa.2007.04.019?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Lunchao Hu & Kailan Tian & Xin Wang & Jiang Zhang, 2011. "The "S" Curve Relationship between Export Diversity and Economic Size of Countries," Papers 1105.5891, arXiv.org.
    2. Hu, Lunchao & Tian, Kailan & Wang, Xin & Zhang, Jiang, 2012. "The “S” curve relationship between export diversity and economic size of countries," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 391(3), pages 731-739.
    3. Massimo Palme & José Guerra Ramírez, 2013. "A Critical Assessment and Projection of Urban Vertical Growth in Antofagasta, Chile," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 5(7), pages 1-16, June.
    4. Dalgaard, Carl-Johan & Strulik, Holger, 2011. "Energy distribution and economic growth," Resource and Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 33(4), pages 782-797.
    5. Massimo Palme & Agnese Salvati, 2020. "Sustainability and Urban Metabolism," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(1), pages 1-3, January.
    6. Michele Morganti & Anna Pages-Ramon & Helena Coch & Antonio Isalgue, 2019. "Buildingmass and Energy Demand in Conventional Housing Typologies of the Mediterranean City," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 11(13), pages 1-18, June.
    7. Mohamed R Ibrahim & James Haworth & Tao Cheng, 2021. "URBAN-i: From urban scenes to mapping slums, transport modes, and pedestrians in cities using deep learning and computer vision," Environment and Planning B, , vol. 48(1), pages 76-93, January.
    8. Zhang, Jiang & Yu, Tongkui, 2010. "Allometric scaling of countries," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 389(21), pages 4887-4896.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:382:y:2007:i:2:p:643-649. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/physica-a-statistical-mechpplications/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.