Analyzing urban scaling laws in the United States over 115 years
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21248045 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Keith Burghardt (0000-0003-1164-9545, USC Information Sciences Institute, USA, corresponding author), Johannes Uhl (0000-0002-4861-5915, University of Colorado Boulder), Kristina Lerman (0000-0002-5071-0575, USC Information Sciences Institute, USA), Stefan Leyk (0000-0001-9180-4853, University of Colorado Boulder) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 51 |
| Issue | 9 |
| Pages | 2249-2263 |
| Publication date | 2024-11-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Environment and Planning B Urban Analytics and City Science (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2399-8083 • E-ISSN: 2399-8091 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/23998083241240099 |
| OpenAlex | W4394676653 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 59 |
The scaling relations between city attributes and population are emergent and ubiquitous aspects of urban growth. Quantifying these relations and understanding their theoretical foundation, however, is difficult due to the challenge of defining city boundaries and a lack of historical data to study city dynamics over time and space. To address this issue, we analyze scaling between city infrastructure and population across 857 metropolitan areas in the conterminous United States over an unprecedented 115 years (1900–2015) using dasymetrically refined historical population estimates, historical urban road network models, and multi-temporal settlement data to define dynamic city boundaries. We demonstrate that urban scaling exponents closely match theoretical models over a century. Despite some close quantitative agreement with theory, the empirical scaling relations unexpectedly vary across regions. Our analysis of scaling coefficients, meanwhile, reveals that contemporary cities use more developed land and kilometers of road than cities of similar population in 1900, which has serious implications for urban development and impacts on the local environment. Overall, our results provide a new way to study urban systems based on novel, geohistorical data
Geometry · Physics · Political science · Scaling · Scaling law · Statistical physics · Land Use and Ecosystem Services · Law · Mathematics · Regional Economics and Spatial Analysis · Urban Design and Spatial Analysis
The Area and Population of Cities
Zipf's law for all the natural cities in the United States
The Origins of Scaling in Cities
A century of sprawl in the United States
Implications of agricultural transitions and urbanization for ecosystem services
The Urban Transformation of the Developing World
Projected land-use change impacts on ecosystem services in the United States
Gibrat's Law for (All) Cities
Chapter 53 The evolution of city size distributions
Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities
Laws of population growth
Scaling of urban economic outputs
Road network evolution in the urban and rural United States since 1900
A multi-scale analysis of 27,000 urban street networks
Long-term trends in domestic US passenger travel
Urban Science
A major shift in U.S. land development avoids significant losses in forest and agricultural land
Global patterns of current and future road infrastructure
Areal Interpolation and Dasymetric Mapping Methods Using Local Ancillary Data Sources
Mapping Population Distribution in the Urban Environment
Measuring urban agglomeration using a city-scale dasymetric population map
Settlement scaling theory
Central City White Flight
The Low-Density Urban Systems of the Classic Period Maya and Izapa
Scaling of Hunter-Gatherer Camp Size and Human Sociality
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 3 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |