From global scaling to the dynamics of individual cities

Depersin, Jules; Barthélemy, Marc

doi:10.1073/pnas.1718690115

Cited by 106 publications

(92 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…From a theoretical point of view, recent studies have investigated the structural advantage of cities in a wide range of output indicators, from patent production to personal income, through the robust framework of scaling [8,16]. In particular, superlinear scaling of cities' growth has been explained as a consequence of increased social interactions with population density [7] and by the process of selective migration of highly productive individuals into larger cities [26,54].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Facebook Ads as a Demographic Tool to Measure the Urban-Rural Divide

Rama

Mejova

Tizzoni

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the Web Conference 2020

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In the global move toward urbanization, making sure the people remaining in rural areas are not left behind in terms of development and policy considerations is a priority for governments worldwide. However, it is increasingly challenging to track important statistics concerning this sparse, geographically dispersed population, resulting in a lack of reliable, up-to-date data. In this study, we examine the usefulness of the Facebook Advertising platform, which offers a digital "census" of over two billions of its users, in measuring potential rural-urban inequalities. We focus on Italy, a country where about 30% of the population lives in rural areas. First, we show that the population statistics that Facebook produces suffer from instability across time and incomplete coverage of sparsely populated municipalities. To overcome such limitation, we propose an alternative methodology for estimating Facebook Ads audiences that nearly triples the coverage of the rural municipalities from 19% to 55% and makes feasible fine-grained sub-population analysis. Using official national census data, we evaluate our approach and confirm known significant urban-rural divides in terms of educational attainment and income. Extending the analysis to Facebook-specific user "interests" and behaviors, we provide further insights on the divide, for instance, finding that rural areas show a higher interest in gambling. Notably, we find that the most predictive features of income in rural areas differ from those for urban centres, suggesting researchers need to consider a broader range of attributes when examining rural wellbeing. The findings of this study illustrate the necessity of improving existing tools and methodologies to include under-represented populations in digital demographic studies -the failure to do so could result in misleading observations, conclusions, and most importantly, policies.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Facebook Ads as a Demographic Tool to Measure the Urban-Rural Divide

Rama

Mejova

Tizzoni

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the Web Conference 2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…The different cities display then a variety of behaviors ranging from pure power laws with exponents larger than one, or two power laws, etc. (see [56] for details). The scaling obtained by averaging over all cities appears then completely unrelated to the dynamics of individual cities when their population grow.…”

Section: Averaging Over Many Cities ?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As we discuss in the text there is no obvious relation between the global power-law scaling and the individual behavior of cities. Figure taken from [56].…”

Section: Averaging Over Many Cities ?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling cities

Barthélemy

2019

Comptes Rendus Physique

Self Cite

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Cities are systems with a large number of constituents and agents interacting with each other and can be considered as emblematic of complex systems. Modeling these systems is a real challenge and triggered the interest of many disciplines such as quantitative geography, spatial economics, geomatics and urbanism, and more recently physics. (Statistical) Physics plays a major role by bringing tools and concepts able to bridge theory and empirical results, and we will illustrate this on some fundamental aspects of cities: the growth of their surface area and their population, their spatial organization, and the spatial distribution of activities. We will present state-of-the-art results and models but also open problems for which we still have a partial understanding and where physics approaches could be particularly helpful. We will end this short review with a discussion about the possibility of constructing a science of cities.

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“…This has led to numerous studies on how the diverse properties of cities are changing with population, for instance addressing patent numbers, the selling of gas, road length, occupational structure, congestion, crime, etc. Nowadays, this subfield is still very dynamic and animated by a debate about the statistical validity and explanatory power of these relations (Arcaute et al 2015;Cottineau et al 2017;Depersin and Barthelemy 2018). The SIM school (on simulation and complexity) and ECON (economic geography) papers follow quite different trends.…”

Section: Vocabulary and Citation Patternsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Evolution of the Systems of Cities Literature Since 1995: Schools of Thought and their Interaction

2018

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The study of relations between cities has long been a major focus in urban research. For decades, this field has grown integrating contributions from many disciplines. But today, the field appears rather fragmented. This study analyses the body of literature that has developed over the last 23 years to identify schools of thought on interurban relationships and to see to what extent these interact with each other. It does so by innovatively employing bibliometric analysis to the study of systems of cities, which allows a bottom-up identification of five schools of thought: one predominantly focusing on the regional or intra-metropolitan scale and centred on concepts of polycentricity; one addressing the global scale with a focus on world city networks; one employing simulation and complexity theories to understand behaviour of agents building the urban system bottom-up; one rooted in (new) economic geography and focusing on growth and decline in the urban system; and, one seeking regularities with respect to city size distributions. The conceptual, methodological and empirical aspects of these different schools are discussed by means of a 'semantic map' derived from the vocabulary of titles and abstracts of papers. The coupling of the semantic map with the citation networks of these schools of thought confirms the increasing fragmentation of the field over the last decades. However, in the most recent years, the different schools of thought start to interact slightly more. The desirability and feasibility of a move from multidisciplinarity to interdisciplinarity in urban systems research needs further exploration.

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From global scaling to the dynamics of individual cities

Cited by 106 publications

References 27 publications

Facebook Ads as a Demographic Tool to Measure the Urban-Rural Divide

Facebook Ads as a Demographic Tool to Measure the Urban-Rural Divide

Modeling cities

The Evolution of the Systems of Cities Literature Since 1995: Schools of Thought and their Interaction

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