Diverse cities or the systematic paradox of Urban Scaling Laws

作者：Clémentine Cottineau, Erez Hatna, Elsa Arcaute, Michael Batty · 发表于：Computers Environment and Urban Systems · 年份：2016 · DOI：10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2016.04.006 · 被引用次数：226 · 研究领域：Land Use and Ecosystem Services、Urban Design and Spatial Analysis、Regional Economics and Spatial Analysis

Scaling laws are powerful summaries of the variations of urban attributes with city size. However, the validity of their universal meaning for cities is hampered by the observation that different scaling regimes can be encountered for the same territory, time and attribute, depending on the criteria used to delineate cities. The aim of this paper is to present new insights concerning this variation, coupled with a sensitivity analysis of urban scaling in France, for several socio-economic and infrastructural attributes from data collected exhaustively at the local level. The sensitivity analysis considers different aggregations of local units for which data are given by the Population Census. We produce a large variety of definitions of cities (approximatively 5000) by aggregating local Census units corresponding to the systematic combination of three definitional criteria: density, commuting flows and population cutoffs. We then measure the magnitude of scaling estimations and their sensitivity to city definitions for several urban indicators, showing for example that simple population cutoffs impact dramatically on the results obtained for a given system and attribute. Variations are interpreted with respect to the meaning of the attributes (socio-economic descriptors as well as infrastructure) and the urban definitions used (understood as the combination of the three criteria). Because of the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP) and of the heterogeneous morphologies and so...