ArticleNature communications2022
Spatial structure of city population growth.
Article in Nature communications, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
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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.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- 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
- Inferring fine-grained migration patterns across the United States.Nature communications · 2025Article
- A stochastic theory of urban metabolism.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Analysis and 15-Year Projections of the Global Burden of Tension-Type Headache by Sex from 1990 to 2021: A Systematic Review of GBD 2021 Data.Journal of pain research · 2025Article
- The angiogenic growth of cities.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We show here that population growth, resolved at the county level, is spatially heterogeneous both among and within the U.S. metropolitan statistical areas. Our analysis of data for over 3,100 U.S. counties reveals that annual population flows, resulting from domestic migration during the 2015-2019 period, are much larger than natural demographic growth, and are primarily responsible for this heterogeneous growth. More precisely, we show that intra-city flows are generally along a negative population density gradient, while inter-city flows are concentrated in high-density core areas. Intra-city flows are anisotropic and generally directed towards external counties of cities, driving asymmetrical urban sprawl. Such domestic migration dynamics are also responsible for tempering local population shocks by redistributing inflows within a given city. This spill-over effect leads to a smoother population dynamics at the county level, in contrast to that observed at the city level. Understanding the spatial structure of domestic migration flows is a key ingredient for analyzing their drivers and consequences, thus representing a crucial knowledge for urban policy makers and planners.
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Registered trials
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