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Natural fragmentation increases urban density but impedes transportation and city growth worldwide

Nature Cities volume 1, pages 642–653 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Physical geography has long been identified as critical for urban development, land use and environmental outcomes in cities worldwide. However, the literature has yet to provide comprehensive, quantitative analyses of the global extent and impact of urban geographic barriers. Here we introduce three novel indexes: the share of natural barriers, nonconvexity (a measure of natural fragmentation) and the average road detour, to measure and study the practical reach and effects of natural constraints around global cities. We calculate these indexes for areas in and around four separate global city-boundary definitions, augmenting the original data with additional variables. We find that natural barriers lead to more complex transportation environments and are associated with higher urban densities, smaller urbanized footprints, taller buildings and less pollution but also with lower incomes and smaller populations. To draw meaningful policy conclusions, comparative research about environmental, economic and social outcomes across global cities should always account for their surrounding geographies.

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Fig. 1: Physical barriers in four global cities.
Fig. 2: Distribution of share of barriers and nonconvexity across the world.
Fig. 3: Statistical analysis of detour index.

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Data availability

The original datasets analyzed in this study are publicly available, as referenced in the article. The indicators derived from the datasets and the three urban indexes measuring geographic barriers can be found via GitHub at https://github.com/WilliamLiPro/Fragmented_by_Nature.

Code availability

The Python code for calculating the three geographic barriers and the Stata code for regressions we use in this study can be found via GitHub at https://github.com/WilliamLiPro/Fragmented_by_Nature.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the research assistance from D. Niu and X. Wang and for their helpful comments during the experiment and earlier draft of this paper. The authors received no specific funding for this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Luyao Wang & Albert Saiz

  2. State Key Lab for Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

    Luyao Wang

  3. Research Center of Big Data, College of Information and Communication, Wuhan, China

    Luyao Wang & Weipeng Li

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  1. Luyao Wang
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  2. Albert Saiz
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Contributions

L.W. and A.S. designed the project, performed the analysis and wrote and edited the paper. W.L. designed the algorithm and reviewed the paper.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Albert Saiz or Weipeng Li.

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Nature Cities thanks Shlomo Angel, Mehebub Sahana and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Sections 1–5, Figs. 1–22 and Tables 1–14.

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Supplementary Data 1

All the indicators and Stata code.

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Wang, L., Saiz, A. & Li, W. Natural fragmentation increases urban density but impedes transportation and city growth worldwide. Nat Cities 1, 642–653 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-024-00118-5

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