ArticleScientific reports2020
Understanding the mesoscopic scaling patterns within cities.
Article in Scientific reports, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- 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
- A stochastic theory of urban metabolism.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- A visitor-enriched census in the U.S. cities using large-scale mobile positioning data.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Article
- Analyzing Mega-mobility Systems in Smart Cities: A Macro-Micro Integration with Feedback Paradigm Empowered by Artificial Intelligence.Research (Washington, D.C.) · 2025Review
- An Exact Theory of Causal Emergence for Linear Stochastic Iteration Systems.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Cities of the Anthropocene: urban sustainability in an eco-evolutionary perspective.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Assessing the spatial distribution of and inequality in 15-minute PCR test site accessibility in Beijing and Guangzhou, China.Applied geography (Sevenoaks, England) · 2023Article
- Urban scaling laws arise from within-city inequalities.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- Non-trivial relationship between scaling behavior and the spatial organization of GDP in Indonesian cities.PloS one · 2022Article
- A gridded establishment dataset as a proxy for economic activity in China.Scientific data · 2021Article
- The structure, centrality, and scale of urban street networks: Cases from Pre-Industrial Afro-Eurasia.PloS one · 2021Article
- Multiscale dynamic human mobility flow dataset in the U.S. during the COVID-19 epidemic.Scientific data · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
Understanding quantitative relationships between urban elements is crucial for a wide range of applications. The observation at the macroscopic level demonstrates that the aggregated urban quantities (e.g., gross domestic product) scale systematically with population sizes across cities, also known as urban scaling laws. However, at the mesoscopic level, we lack an understanding of whether the simple scaling relationship holds within cities, which is a fundamental question regarding the spatial origin of scaling in urban systems. Here, by analyzing four extensive datasets covering millions of mobile phone users and urban facilities, we investigate the scaling phenomena within cities. We find that the mesoscopic infrastructure volume and socioeconomic activity scale sub- and super-linearly with the active population, respectively. For a same scaling phenomenon, however, the exponents vary in cities of similar population sizes. To explain these empirical observations, we propose a conceptual framework by considering the heterogeneous distributions of population and facilities, and the spatial interactions between them. Analytical and numerical results suggest that, despite the large number of complexities that influence urban activities, the simple interaction rules can effectively explain the observed regularity and heterogeneity in scaling behaviors within cities.
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