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Urban scaling and the regional divide.

ABSTRACT: Superlinear growth in cities has been explained as an emergent consequence of increased social interactions in dense urban environments. Using geocoded microdata from Swedish population registers, we remove population composition effects from the scaling relation of wage income to test how much of the previously reported superlinear scaling is truly attributable to increased social interconnectivity in cities. The Swedish data confirm the previously reported scaling relations on the aggregate level, but they provide better information on the micromechanisms responsible for them. We find that the standard interpretation of urban scaling is incomplete as social interactions only explain about half of the scaling parameter of wage income and that scaling relations substantively reflect differences in cities' sociodemographic composition. Those differences are generated by selective migration of highly productive individuals into larger cities. Big cities grow through their attraction of talent from their hinterlands and the already-privileged benefit disproportionally from urban agglomeration.

SUBMITTER: Keuschnigg M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6353621 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Urban scaling and the regional divide.

Keuschnigg Marc M Mutgan Selcan S Hedström Peter P

Science advances 20190130 1

Superlinear growth in cities has been explained as an emergent consequence of increased social interactions in dense urban environments. Using geocoded microdata from Swedish population registers, we remove population composition effects from the scaling relation of wage income to test how much of the previously reported superlinear scaling is truly attributable to increased social interconnectivity in cities. The Swedish data confirm the previously reported scaling relations on the aggregate le ...[more]

PMID: 30729161

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Project description:During the last years, the new science of cities has been established as a fertile quantitative approach to systematically understand the urban phenomena. One of its main pillars is the proposition that urban systems display universal scaling behavior regarding socioeconomic, infrastructural and individual basic services variables. This paper discusses the extension of the universality proposition by testing it against a broad range of urban metrics in a developing country urban system. We present an exploration of the scaling exponents for over 60 variables for the Brazilian urban system. Estimating those exponents is challenging from the technical point of view because the Brazilian municipalities' definition follows local political criteria and does not regard characteristics of the landscape, density, and basic utilities. As Brazilian municipalities can deviate significantly from urban settlements, urban-like municipalities were selected based on a systematic density cut-off procedure and the scaling exponents were estimated for this new subset of municipalities. To validate our findings we compared the results for overlaying variables with other studies based on alternative methods. It was found that the analyzed socioeconomic variables follow a superlinear scaling relationship with the population size, and most of the infrastructure and individual basic services variables follow expected sublinear and linear scaling, respectively. However, some infrastructural and individual basic services variables deviated from their expected regimes, challenging the universality hypothesis of urban scaling. We propose that these deviations are a product of top-down decisions/policies. Our analysis spreads over a time-range of 10 years, what is not enough to draw conclusive observations, nevertheless we found hints that the scaling exponent of these variables are evolving towards the expected scaling regime, indicating that the deviations might be temporally constrained and that the urban systems might eventually reach the expected scaling regime.

Dataset Information

Urban scaling and the regional divide.

Publications

Urban scaling and the regional divide.

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