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A synergetic perspective on urban scaling, urban regulatory focus and their interrelations.

ABSTRACT: By means of rich data, studies on urban scaling suggested that many urban properties scale with city size in universal ways. A recent study suggested an explanation why the behaviour of citizens in small and large cities differs qualitatively, by deriving the urban agents' behaviour from an extended version of Higgins' regulatory focus theory regarding humans' motivational system. Based on several sets of laboratory experiments, this study demonstrated that urban context of large, fast-paced cities and that of small slow-paced cities encourage two distinctively different motivations and behaviours on the part of their inhabitants. What remains an open question following the above study, however, is the way these behavioural reactions are related to the dynamics of cities as complex, adaptive, self-organization systems. The aim of the present paper is to answer this open question. It does so from the theoretical perspective of Synergetics and its application to the domain of cities by means of synergetic inter-representation networks, information adaptation and their conjunction. From this conjunction, the paper suggests a theoretical interpretation associated with a mathematical model that links the theoretical framework to the empirical findings.

SUBMITTER: Haken H

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6731708 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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A synergetic perspective on urban scaling, urban regulatory focus and their interrelations.

Haken Hermann H Portugali Juval J

Royal Society open science 20190821 8

By means of rich data, studies on urban scaling suggested that many urban properties scale with city size in universal ways. A recent study suggested an explanation why the behaviour of citizens in small and large cities differs qualitatively, by deriving the urban agents' behaviour from an extended version of Higgins' <i>regulatory focus theory</i> regarding humans' motivational system. Based on several sets of laboratory experiments, this study demonstrated that urban context of large, fast-pa ...[more]

PMID: 31598267

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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

A synergetic perspective on urban scaling, urban regulatory focus and their interrelations.

Publications

A synergetic perspective on urban scaling, urban regulatory focus and their interrelations.

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