We undertake an exploration of the economic income (Gross Domestic Product, GDP) of Indian districts and cities based on scaling analyses of the dependence of these quantities on associated population size. Scaling analysis provides a straightforward method for the identification of network...

A large literature establishes the role of mobility in the maintenance of neighborhood social structures. Jane Jacobs famously argued that social capital is maintained through “cross-use of space,” and James Coleman formalized its dependence on the “closure” of human interactions. Since...

This is a report on the discussions held during an NSF SUS conference “Graduate Education for a New Sustainable Urban Systems Science: Designing a New PhD Curriculum Integrating Sustainability Science and Urban Science”. The conference was motivated by the call made by the NSF for...

Scaling is a general analytical framework used by many disciplines — from physics to biology and the social sciences — to characterize how population–averaged properties of a collective vary with its size. The observation of scale invariance over some range identifies general system types,...

The emergence of India as an urbanized nation is one of the most significant socioeconomic and political processes of the 21st century. An essential feature of India's urbanization has been the growth and persistence of informal settlements (slums) in its fast-developing cities. Whether living...

Nowhere has the scale and scope of urbanization been larger than in China over the last few decades. We analyze Chinese city development over the past 20 years, using data for the urbanized components of prefecture-level cities. We show that, despite much variability and fast economic and...

Societal responses to crises require coordination at multiple levels of organization. Exploring early efforts to contain COVID-19 in the U.S., we argue that local governments can act to ensure systemic resilience and recovery when higher-level governments fail to do so. Event history analyses...

Many forms of ambient data in cities are starting to become available that allow tracking of short-term urban operations, such as traffic management, trash collections, inspections or non-emergency maintenance requests. However, arguably the greatest promise of urban analytics is to set up...

Cities are some of the most complex dynamical systems in human societies and in nature. There is growing interest in producing more comprehensive quantitative theory, capable of describing many of the features now observable in urban environments, especially those that show empirical...

Comparative studies of cities throughout history are one of the greatest sources of insight into the nature of change in human societies. This paper discusses strategies to anchor these comparisons on well-defined, quantitative and empirical characteristics of cities, derived from theory and...