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Urban science

A successful few drive urban scaling

Nature Computational Science volume 3, page 118 (2023)Cite this article

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Researchers have established that there is a power-law relationship between various urban indicators — such as revenue and wealth — and city population size, meaning that these socio-economic quantities increase more than proportionally as the city population expands. Interpretations of this relationship include high levels of social interconnectivity, social exchange, and industrial complexity in dense urban systems, which drive further developments in these cities. Yet, existing models of the scaling phenomenon assume that all of the residents of a city have equal levels of productivity and numbers of network contacts — and that they equally contribute to the city’s total outputs — when, in fact, cities exhibit heavy-tail distributions, in which small fractions of the population contribute to large proportions of the urban indicators. In a recent work, Martin Arvidsson and colleagues acknowledge the skewness of urban indicators and offer a comprehensive study on how the heavy tails contribute to the urban scaling relationship.

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  1. Nature Computational Science https://www.nature.com/natcomputsci

    Fernando Chirigati

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  1. Fernando Chirigati
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Correspondence to Fernando Chirigati.

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Chirigati, F. A successful few drive urban scaling. Nat Comput Sci 3, 118 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-023-00413-6

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