Dresden 2017 – scientific programme
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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme
SOE 15: Focus Session: Cities as complex systems
SOE 15.7: Talk
Wednesday, March 22, 2017, 16:45–17:00, GÖR 226
Formulae of urban attractiveness — •Stanislav Sobolevsky1, Iva Bojic2, Alexander Belyi2, and Carlo Ratti2 — 1New York University — 2Massachusetts Institute Of Technology
Scientific studies investigating the laws and regularities of human behavior are nowadays increasingly relying on the wealth of widely available digital information produced by human social activity. In this paper, we leverage big data created by three different aspects of human activity (i.e., geotagged photographs and tweets as well as bank card transactions whenever available) in Europe and the US for quantifying city attractiveness for the foreign visitors. An important finding is the strong superlinear scaling of city attractiveness with its population size. The observed scaling exponent stays around 1.5 - nearly the same for different ways of defining cities, different data sources and different geographies, emphasizing the robustness of our finding. In contrary to cities, exponents for country attractiveness are less than one, indicating sublinearity. Finally, scaling exponent for the foreign attractiveness of the US states, which are smaller, but still composite areas similar to countries, fells somewhere in between values of exponents for city and country attractiveness, but still tend to be slightly sublinear similar to the case of countries. After getting those results, we propose and evaluate a possible explanatory mechanism for the observed effects based on a simple discrete choice model.