ArticleNature communications2017
Simple spatial scaling rules behind complex cities.
Article in Nature communications, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 44 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
44 citing papers in PubMed.
- Traffic-Weighted Detour Ratio Identifies Inefficient Cycling Routes.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Urban vibrancy: An analogy of biodiversity, retail diversity, and activity-based urban diversity measures.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Intra-settlement scaling across the urban-rural continuum: material stocks, service provisioning, and greenhouse gas emissions in the contiguous United States.Journal of industrial ecology · 2026Article
- Spatial Scale Selection for Urban Systems: A Complexity-Heterogeneity Balancing Method.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- The effective intervening opportunity model for seasonal human mobility.Innovation (Cambridge (Mass.)) · 2025Article
- Human Mobility Datasets in the Complex Metro System of Shanghai.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Identifying Polycentric Urban Structure Using the Minimum Cycle Basis of Road Network as Building Blocks.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- An Event-Link Network Model Based on Representation in P-Space.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Global consistency of urban scaling evidenced by remote sensing.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Article
- Predictability of human mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- An Exact Theory of Causal Emergence for Linear Stochastic Iteration Systems.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Unravelling the spatial directionality of urban mobility.Nature communications · 2024Article
- The social stratification of internal migration and daily mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Tracking the scaling of urban open spaces in China from 1990 to 2020.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- The angiogenic growth of cities.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- Dynamic charging as a complementary approach in modern EV charging infrastructure.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Article
- The spatiotemporal prediction method of urban population density distribution through behaviour environment interaction agent model.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- A high-frequency mobility big-data reveals how COVID-19 spread across professions, locations and age groups.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Although most of wealth and innovation have been the result of human interaction and cooperation, we are not yet able to quantitatively predict the spatial distributions of three main elements of cities: population, roads, and socioeconomic interactions. By a simple model mainly based on spatial attraction and matching growth mechanisms, we reveal that the spatial scaling rules of these three elements are in a consistent framework, which allows us to use any single observation to infer the others. All numerical and theoretical results are consistent with empirical data from ten representative cities. In addition, our model can also provide a general explanation of the origins of the universal super- and sub-linear aggregate scaling laws and accurately predict kilometre-level socioeconomic activity. Our work opens a new avenue for uncovering the evolution of cities in terms of the interplay among urban elements, and it has a broad range of applications.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.