ArticleNature human behaviour2023
Urban scaling laws arise from within-city inequalities.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- A universal scaling law of intra-urban inequality.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Satellite mapping of every building's function in urban China reveals deep built environment disparities.Nature communications · 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
- Unraveling urban dynamics: Scaling laws of human mobility across the cityscape divide.Fundamental research · 2025Article
- Modeling the rise and demise of Classic Maya cities: Climate, conflict, and economies of scale.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Application of artificial intelligence graph convolutional network in classroom grade evaluation.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- A stochastic theory of urban metabolism.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
- Why the Fermi paradox may not be well explained by Wong and Bartlett's theory of civilization collapse. A Comment on: 'Asymptotic burnout and homeostatic awakening: a possible solution to the Fermi paradox?' (2022) by Wong and Bartlett.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- Article
- The urban desirability paradox: U.K. urban-rural differences in well-being, social satisfaction, and economic satisfaction.Science advances · 2024Article
- Research on the impact of China's reform to delegate power, streamline administration, and optimize government services on the technology innovation efficiency of the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry.Frontiers in public health · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Theories of urban scaling have demonstrated remarkable predictive accuracy at aggregate levels. However, they have overlooked the stark inequalities that exist within cities. Human networking and productivity exhibit heavy-tailed distributions, with some individuals contributing disproportionately to city totals. Here we use micro-level data from Europe and the United States on interconnectivity, productivity and innovation in cities. We find that the tails of within-city distributions and their growth by city size account for 36-80% of previously reported scaling effects, and 56-87% of the variance in scaling between indicators of varying economic complexity. Providing explanatory depth to these findings, we identify a mechanism-city size-dependent cumulative advantage-that constitutes an important channel through which differences in the size of tails emerge. Our findings demonstrate that urban scaling is in large part a story about inequality in cities, implying that the causal processes underlying the heavier tails in larger cities must be considered in explanations of urban scaling. This result also shows that agglomeration effects benefit urban elites the most, with the majority of city dwellers partially excluded from the socio-economic benefits of growing cities.
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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.