An example of the law of scaling cities is the number of gas stations: if a city has 20 gas stations
This growth rate is approximately 0.80 and applies tomost of the city's infrastructure. For example, energy consumption per person or city area increases by only 80% for every doubling of the population. Since this growth is slower than doubling, it is called sublinear growth.
On the other hand, cities are more than doubling in other directions: the amount of money at the same job, the number of phone calls, and even the pace of walking.This superlinear growth rate is about 120%.
In order to understand where these 0.8 and1,2, the researchers first mapped the place where people lived. Then they used open data on the height of buildings in more than 4,700 cities in Europe and assigned a point of residence for each person and called such associations human clouds.
Zoomed in human clouds lookssimilar to a single whole. Based on these human associations, the researchers were able to determine the fractal dimension of a city's population, or the ratio of change in detail to change in scale. As a result, they obtained an average that describes the human cloud in each city. In the same way, they calculated the fractal dimension of the urban road network.
The authors found that these data are very different, but the ratio is always about the same.The authors believe that their discovery will help to properly build cities and design technological spaces without interference for the comfort of the population.
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