Dresden 2017 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 15: Focus Session: Cities as complex systems

SOE 15.5: Vortrag

Mittwoch, 22. März 2017, 16:00–16:15, GÖR 226

Urban systems rank diversity — •Roberto Murcio, Clementine Cottineau, Michael Batty, Elsa Arcaute, and Robin Morphet — University College London, London, UK

Digest the complex temporal dynamics of hierarchical communities is hard to attain in a way that capture the changes in rank and size of its members. Particularly, in urban systems, scaling laws and rank clocks approaches have proved to capture much of this dynamic at macro and micro scales respectively, summarizing the variation of urban attributes with city size. Here we argue that examining the behaviour of the rank itself, measuring the number of cities occupying that rank over time, could give some insights about the self-organization process these urban hierarchical structures experience as the system evolves in time. We applied this distribution, namely rank diversity, to three different urban systems: UK and USA (1900 to 2010) and former Soviet Union cities (1840 to 2010). Our findings point out the profound differences between the UK and the USA/Soviet Union urban structures, reinforcing the notion that there is no rank-size universality to be found in cities. Exploring the moments of the distribution and applying classical Zipf's law corpus analysis, we clustered cities in three categories: "seed", containing cities that practically do not change their rank in time; "epoch-dependant", comprising those [cities] which fluctuation in rank is considerably and finally, if a city exhibit a limited change in rank, we labelled as a "content bearing" city. The size of the seed set is similar in all urban systems while the tail is more similar between USA and the Soviet Union than with the UK.