Berlin 2015 – scientific programme

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 40: Physics of Sustainability and Human-Nature Interactions - Part I (joint session SOE/ DY/ jDPG/ BP/ AKE)

DY 40.3: Talk

Wednesday, March 18, 2015, 17:30–17:45, MA 001

The size distribution, scaling properties and spatial organization of urban clusters: a global and regional perspective — •Till Fluschnik, Steffen Kriewald, Anselmo García Cantú Ros, Bin Zhou, Dominik Reusser, Jürgen Peter Kropp, and Diego Rybski — Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)

Human development has far-reaching impacts on the surface of the globe. The transformation of natural land cover occurs in different forms and urban growth is one of the most eminent transformative processes. We analyze global land cover data and extract cities as defined by maximally connected urban clusters. The analysis of the city size distribution for all cities on the globe confirms Zipf's law. Moreover, by investigating the percolation properties of the clustering of urban areas we assess the closeness to criticality. We study the Zipf-exponents as a function of the closeness to percolation and find a systematic decrease with increasing scale, which could be the reason for deviating exponents reported in literature.