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Explaining the Prevalence, Scaling and Variance of Urban Phenomena

 
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Author
Gomez, AndresHARVARD
Patterson-Lomba, Oscar
Hausmann, RicardoHARVARD
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https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/cid/publications
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Citation
Gomez-Lievano, Andres, Oscar Patterson-Lomba, and Ricardo Hausmann. “Explaining the Prevalence, Scaling and Variance of Urban Phenomena.” CID Working Paper Series 2016.329, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, December 2016.
Abstract
The prevalence of many urban phenomena changes systematically with population size1. We propose a theory that unifies models of economic complexity2, 3 and cultural evolution4 to derive urban scaling. The theory accounts for the difference in scaling exponents and average prevalence across phenomena, as well as the difference in the variance within phenomena across cities of similar size. The central ideas are that a number of necessary complementary factors must be simultaneously present for a phenomenon to occur, and that the diversity of factors is logarithmically related to population size. The model reveals that phenomena that require more factors will be less prevalent, scale more superlinearly and show larger variance across cities of similar size. The theory applies to data on education, employment, innovation, disease and crime, and it entails the ability to predict the prevalence of a phenomenon across cities, given information about the prevalence in a single city.
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This article is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of-use#LAA
Citable link to this page
https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37366361

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