ArticleScience advances2020
Urban growth and the emergent statistics of cities.
Article in Science advances, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed.
- A Dataset for Multiple Structural Representations of Urban Road Maps Across Chinese Cities.Scientific data · 2026Article
- Large cities lose their growth advantage as countries urbanize.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Dynamic roughening of cities driven by multiplicative noise.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Unraveling urban dynamics: Scaling laws of human mobility across the cityscape divide.Fundamental research · 2025Article
- A stochastic theory of urban metabolism.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Changes in agglomeration and productivity are poor predictors of inequality across the archaeological record.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Big cities fuel inequality within and across generations.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Rising infrastructure inequalities accompany urbanization and economic development.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Tipping points toward sustainability: The role of industrial ecology.Journal of industrial ecology · 2025Article
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- Identification and measurement of intensive economic growth in a Roman imperial province.Science advances · 2024Article
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- Implicit racial biases are lower in more populous more diverse and less segregated US cities.Nature communications · 2024Article
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- Urban economic fitness and complexity from patent data.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Urban scaling laws arise from within-city inequalities.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- The Nonlinear Impact of Mobile Human Activities on Vegetation Change in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2023Article
- Cities can benefit from complex supply chains.npj urban sustainability · 2023Article
- Spatial structure of city population growth.Nature communications · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Urban theory models cities as spatial equilibria to derive their aggregate properties as functions of extensive variables, such as population size. However, this assumption seems at odds with cities' most interesting properties as engines of fast and variable processes of growth and change. Here, we build a general statistical dynamics of cities across scales, from single agents to entire urban systems. We include agents' strategic behavior to produce predictable growth rates, which requires balancing relative incomes and costs over time. We implement these dynamics using stochastic differential equations and control theory to demonstrate a number of general emergent properties of cities deriving from limit theorems applied to growth rates. This framework establishes necessary conditions for scaling to be conserved by urban dynamics and shows how exponent corrections can be calculated. These ideas are tested using stochastic simulations and a long timeseries for 382 US Metropolitan Areas over nearly five decades.
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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.