ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
Scaling of the morphology of African cities.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 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
12 citing papers in PubMed, 41 citations in OpenAlex.
- Scaling and Population Loss in Mexican Urban Centres.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Global increases in built-up volume indicate more divergent and less dispersed urban expansion patterns.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
- A temporally harmonised gridded building-stock dataset for the Global South, 2016-2023.Gates open research · 2026Article
- Article
- Unsupervised deep clustering of high-resolution satellite imagery reveals phenotypes of urban development in Sub-Saharan Africa.The Science of the total environment · 2025Article
- Global consistency of urban scaling evidenced by remote sensing.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Commentary: A road map for future data-driven urban planning and environmental health research.Cities (London, England) · 2024Article
- Exploring the nexus of urban form, transport, environment and health in large-scale urban studies: A state-of-the-art scoping review.Environmental research · 2024Article
- Article
- The urban desirability paradox: U.K. urban-rural differences in well-being, social satisfaction, and economic satisfaction.Science advances · 2024Article
- Spatial patterns of built structures co-determine nations' level of resource demand.Journal of industrial ecology · 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
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A large proportion of Africa's infrastructure is yet to be built. Where and how these new buildings are constructed matters since today's decisions will last for decades. The resulting morphology of cities has lasting implications for a city's energy needs. Estimating and projecting these needs has always been challenging in Africa due to the lack of data. Yet, given the sweeping urbanization expected in Africa over the next three decades, this obstacle must be overcome to guide cities toward a trajectory of sustainability and resilience. Based on the location and surface of nearly 200 million buildings on the continent, we estimate the interbuilding distance of almost six thousand cities. Buildings' footprint data enable the construction of urban form indicators to compare African cities' elongation, sprawl, and emptiness. We establish the BASE model, where the mean distance between buildings is a functional relation to the number of Buildings and their average Area, as well as the Sprawl and the Elongation of its spatial arrangement. The mean distance between structures in cities-our proxy for its energy demands related to mobility-grows faster than the square root of its population, resulting from the combined impact of a sublinear growth in the number of buildings and a sublinear increase in building size and sprawl. We estimate that when a city doubles its population, it triples its energy demand from transport.
Indexed as
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.