Computer & Information Sciences

Cities as Complex Systems

Published July 28, 2021 Calls for Papers Collections

Cities are centres of human interactions and the innovations that arise from them. Urbanization has led to many positive developments for society, but also contributes to many of our most pressing challenges, from sustainability and climate change to poverty and inequality.

In this PLOS ONE collection, our expert guest editors have compiled a selection of complex systems and networks research that is applied to questions in urban science.

Jump to section

PLOS ONE Collection

PLOS ONE Collection

Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0262964 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Cities as complex systems—Collection overview
February 25, 2022 Diego Rybski, Marta C. González

This collection provides a contemporary excerpt of “Cities as complex systems”. The contributions have been submitted between April and…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0272863 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Recent advances in urban system science: Models and data
August 17, 2022 Elsa Arcaute, José J. Ramasco

Cities are characterized by the presence of a dense population with a high potential for interactions between individuals of diverse…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0246785 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Leveraging insurance customer data to characterize socioeconomic indicators of Swiss municipalities
March 3, 2021 Lorenzo Donadio, Rossano Schifanella, Claudia R. Binder, Emanuele Massaro

The availability of reliable socioeconomic data is critical for the design of urban policies and the implementation of location-based…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0253904 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE How to tackle complexity in urban climate resilience? Negotiating climate science, adaptation and multi-level governance in India
July 1, 2021 Mahendra Sethi, Richa Sharma, Subhakanta Mohapatra, Shilpi Mittal

As the world’s population is expected to be over 2/3rd urban by 2050, climate action in cities is a growing area of interest in the…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0252290 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE A proposed population-health based metric for evaluating representativeness of air quality monitoring in cities: Using Hong Kong as a demonstration
May 28, 2021 Tilman Leo Hohenberger, Wenwei Che, Jimmy C. H. Fung, Alexis K. H. Lau

City air quality monitoring (AQM) network are typically sparsely distributed due to high operation costs. It is of the question of how…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0246714 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE The heartbeat of the city
February 24, 2021 Rafael Prieto Curiel, Jorge Eduardo Patino, Juan Carlos Duque, Neave O’Clery

Human activity is organised around daily and weekly cycles, which should, in turn, dominate all types of social interactions, such as…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0245771 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Association between population distribution and urban GDP scaling
January 22, 2021 Haroldo V. Ribeiro, Milena Oehlers, Ana I. Moreno-Monroy, Jürgen P. Kropp, Diego Rybski

Urban scaling and Zipf’s law are two fundamental paradigms for the science of cities. These laws have mostly been investigated…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0246429 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Comparison of blue-green solutions for urban flood mitigation: A multi-city large-scale analysis
January 29, 2021 Elena Cristiano, Stefano Farris, Roberto Deidda, Francesco Viola

Flooding risk in cities has been recently exacerbated by increased urbanization and climate change, often with catastrophic consequences…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0252015 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Modelling urban vibrancy with mobile phone and OpenStreetMap data
June 2, 2021 Federico Botta, Mario Gutiérrez-Roig

The concept of urban vibrancy has become increasingly important in the study of cities. A vibrant urban environment is an area of a city…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0250847 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE The evolution of built-up areas in Ghana since 1975
May 21, 2021 Marcel Fafchamps, Forhad Shilpi

We use high resolution satellite data on the proportion of buildings in a 250x250 meter cell to study the evolution of human settlement in…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0251199 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Impacts of California Proposition 47 on crime in Santa Monica, California
May 19, 2021 Jennifer Crodelle, Celeste Vallejo, Markus Schmidtchen, Chad M. Topaz, Maria R. D’Orsogna

We examine patterns of reported crime in Santa Monica, California before and after the passage of Proposition 47, a 2014 initiative that…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0250080 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE A city of cities: Measuring how 15-minutes urban accessibility shapes human mobility in Barcelona
May 5, 2021 Eduardo Graells-Garrido, Feliu Serra-Burriel, Francisco Rowe, Fernando M. Cucchietti, Patricio Reyes

As cities expand, human mobility has become a central focus of urban planning and policy making to make cities more inclusive and…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0249318 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Clustered embedding using deep learning to analyze urban mobility based on complex transportation data
April 20, 2021 Sung-Bae Cho, Jin-Young Kim

Urban mobility is a vital aspect of any city and often influences its physical shape as well as its level of economic and social…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0250348 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE City size based scaling of the urban internal nodes layout
April 23, 2021 Wenhan Feng, Bayi Li, Zebin Chen, Peng Liu

The size of a city is not only essential for depicting the scale of the urban system, but also crucial to support the prosperity, order,…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0250204 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Urban attractors: Discovering patterns in regions of attraction in cities
April 26, 2021 May Alhazzani, Fahad Alhasoun, Zeyad Alawwad, Marta C. González

Understanding the dynamics by which urban areas attract visitors is important in today’s cities that are continuously increasing in…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0249520 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Analysis on the imbalance of population flow network during the Spring Festival travel rush in China in 2015
April 5, 2021 Yanpeng Gao, Xiaofei Xu, Ye Wei

This paper analyzes the imbalance of interprovincial population flow during the Spring Festival travel rush in China, using big data…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0249014 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Societal context-dependent multi-modal transportation network augmentation in Johannesburg, South Africa
April 8, 2021 Thembani Moyo, Alain Y. Kibangou, Walter Musakwa

In most developing countries, formal and informal transportation schemes coexist without effective and smart integration. In this paper,…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0248982 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Ubiquitous digital technologies and spatial structure; an update
April 15, 2021 Emmanouil Tranos, Yannis M. Ioannides

This paper examines the impact of widespread adoption of information and communication technologies (ICT) on urban structure worldwide.…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0248764 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Graph-based ahead monitoring of vulnerabilities in large dynamic transportation networks
March 24, 2021 Angelo Furno, Nour-Eddin El Faouzi, Rajesh Sharma, Eugenio Zimeo

Betweenness Centrality (BC) has proven to be a fundamental metric in many domains to identify the components (nodes) of a system modelled…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0248399 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Towards routine, city-scale accessibility metrics: Graph theoretic interpretations of pedestrian access using personalized pedestrian network analysis
March 19, 2021 Nicholas Bolten, Anat Caspi

A wide range of analytical methods applied to urban systems address the modeling of pedestrian behavior. These include methods for…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0248126 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Topological indexes and community structure for urban mobility networks: Variations in a business day
March 10, 2021 Jéssica D. Lamosa, Lívia R. Tomás, Marcos G. Quiles, Luciana R. Londe, Leonardo B. L. Santos, Elbert E. N. Macau

Topological analysis and community detection in mobility complex networks have an essential role in many contexts, from economics to the…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0247996 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Analysis of mobility homophily in Stockholm based on social network data
March 9, 2021 Cate Heine, Cristina Marquez, Paolo Santi, Marcus Sundberg, Miriam Nordfors, Carlo Ratti

We present a novel metric for measuring relative connection between parts of a city using geotagged Twitter data as a proxy for…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0247795 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE The sociospatial factors of death: Analyzing effects of geospatially-distributed variables in a Bayesian mortality model for Hong Kong
March 24, 2021 Thayer Alshaabi, David R. Dewhurst, James P. Bagrow, Peter S. Dodds, Christopher M. Danforth

Human mortality is in part a function of multiple socioeconomic factors that differ both spatially and temporally. Adjusting for other…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0246925 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Multifractal scaling analyses of urban street network structure: The cases of twelve megacities in China
February 18, 2021 Yuqing Long, Yanguang Chen

Traffic networks have been proved to be fractal systems. However, previous studies mainly focused on monofractal networks, while complex…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0246796 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Spatial dependence in the rank-size distribution of cities – weak but not negligible
February 9, 2021 Rolf Bergs

Power law distributions characterise several natural and social phenomena. Zipf’s law for cities is one of those. The study views the…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0246529 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Unsupervised learning of Swiss population spatial distribution
February 11, 2021 Mikhail Kanevski

The paper deals with the analysis of spatial distribution of Swiss population using fractal concepts and unsupervised learning algorithms.…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0246096 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Machine learning for buildings’ characterization and power-law recovery of urban metrics
January 28, 2021 Alaa Krayem, Aram Yeretzian, Ghaleb Faour, Sara Najem

In this paper we focus on a critical component of the city: its building stock, which holds much of its socio-economic activities. In our…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0246077 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Cascading dominates large-scale disruptions in transport over complex networks
January 25, 2021 Mark M. Dekker, Debabrata Panja

The core functionality of many socio-technical systems, such as supply chains, (inter)national trade and human mobility, concern transport…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0246062 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Large-scale simulation of traffic flow using Markov model
February 9, 2021 Renátó Besenczi, Norbert Bátfai, Péter Jeszenszky, Roland Major, Fanny Monori, Márton Ispány

Modeling and simulating movement of vehicles in established transportation infrastructures, especially in large urban road networks is an…
Image credit
Fig 1. General transmission dynamics of any infectious disease at individual level in INFEKTA. by Gomez et al., CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE INFEKTA—An agent-based model for transmission of infectious diseases: The COVID-19 case in Bogotá, Colombia
February 19, 2021 Jonatan Gomez, Jeisson Prieto, Elizabeth Leon, Arles Rodríguez

The transmission dynamics of the coronavirus—COVID-19—have challenged humankind at almost every level. Currently, research groups around…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0245357 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE A Markov model of urban evolution: Neighbourhood change as a complex process
January 15, 2021 Daniel Silver, Thiago H. Silva

This paper seeks to advance neighbourhood change research and complexity theories of cities by developing and exploring a Markov model of…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0245067 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Automated identification of urban substructure for comparative analysis
January 14, 2021 Rohan L. Aras, Nicholas T. Ouellette, Rishee K. Jain

Neighborhoods are the building blocks of cities, and thus significantly impact urban planning from infrastructure deployment to service…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0244452 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Connectivity assessment and prioritization of urban grasslands as a helpful tool for effective management of urban ecosystem services
December 28, 2020 Hassanali Mollashahi, Magdalena Szymura, Tomasz H. Szymura

Urban grasslands are usually managed as short-cut lawns and have limited biodiversity. Urban grasslands with low-intensity management are…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0244384 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Metropolitan age-specific mortality trends at borough and neighborhood level: The case of Mexico City
January 19, 2021 Karol Baca-López, Cristóbal Fresno, Jesús Espinal-Enríquez, Miriam V. Flores-Merino, Miguel A. Camacho-López, Enrique Hernández-Lemus

Understanding the spatial and temporal patterns of mortality rates in a highly heterogeneous metropolis, is a matter of public policy…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0244331 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Black Rock City versus Manhattan: An economist’s view
January 11, 2021 John Yinger

Urban street networks take many forms, from the circular streets in Black Rock City (which is built and removed every year as part of the…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0244326 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Modeling adaptive reversible lanes: A cellular automata approach
January 4, 2021 Dante Pérez-Méndez, Carlos Gershenson, María Elena Lárraga, José L. Mateos

Dealing with traffic congestion is one of the most pressing challenges for cities. Transport authorities have implemented several…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0244317 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Applying machine learning and geolocation techniques to social media data (Twitter) to develop a resource for urban planning
February 3, 2021 Sveta Milusheva, Robert Marty, Guadalupe Bedoya, Sarah Williams, Elizabeth Resor, Arianna Legovini

With all the recent attention focused on big data, it is easy to overlook that basic vital statistics remain difficult to obtain in most…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0244206 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE StationRank: Aggregate dynamics of the Swiss railway
December 21, 2020 Georg Anagnostopoulos, Vahid Moosavi

Increasing availability and quality of actual, as opposed to scheduled, open transport data offers new possibilities for capturing the…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0244099 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Perception of urban subdivisions in pedestrian movement simulation
December 31, 2020 Gabriele Filomena, Ed Manley, Judith A. Verstegen

The perception of urban subdivisions, deriving from regionalisation processes and the identification of separating elements (barriers),…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0243621 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Cities: Complexity, theory and history
December 8, 2020 Scott G. Ortman, José Lobo, Michael E. Smith

In recent decades researchers in a variety of disciplines have developed a new “urban science,” the central goal of which is to build…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0243501 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE The dynamics of food shopping behavior: Exploring travel patterns in low-income Detroit neighborhoods experiencing extreme disinvestment using agent-based modeling
December 21, 2020 Igor Vojnovic, Arika Ligmann-Zielinska, Timothy F. LeDoux

Only a handful of studies have leveraged agent-based models (ABMs) to examine public health outcomes and policy interventions associated…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0243390 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Spatial interactions in urban scaling laws
December 7, 2020 Eduardo G. Altmann

Analyses of urban scaling laws assume that observations in different cities are independent of the existence of nearby cities. Here we…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0242875 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Dynamic measures for transportation networks
December 3, 2020 Oriol Lordan, Jose M. Sallan

Most complex network analyses of transportation systems use simplified static representations obtained from existing connections in a time…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0242611 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Venues and segregation: A revised Schelling model
January 22, 2021 Daniel Silver, Ultan Byrne, Patrick Adler

This paper examines an important but underappreciated mechanism affecting urban segregation and integration: urban venues. The venue- an…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0242479 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE A Gini approach to spatial CO₂ emissions
November 18, 2020 Bin Zhou, Stephan Thies, Ramana Gudipudi, Matthias K. B. Lüdeke, Jürgen P. Kropp, Diego Rybski

Combining global gridded population and fossil fuel based CO2 emission data at 1 km scale, we investigate the spatial origin of CO2…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0242468 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Exploring the changing geographical pattern of international scientific collaborations through the prism of cities
November 16, 2020 György Csomós, Zsófia Viktória Vida, Balázs Lengyel

Science is becoming increasingly international in terms of breaking down walls in its pursuit of high impact. Despite geographical…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0242357 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Human mobility and urban malaria risk in the main transmission hotspot of Amazonian Brazil
November 25, 2020 Igor C. Johansen, Priscila T. Rodrigues, Marcelo U. Ferreira

Malaria in the Amazon is often perceived as an exclusively rural disease, but transmission has been increasingly documented within and…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0242010 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Learning from urban form to predict building heights
December 9, 2020 Nikola Milojevic-Dupont, Nicolai Hans, Lynn H. Kaack, Marius Zumwald, François Andrieux, Daniel de Barros Soares, Steffen Lohrey, Peter-Paul Pichler, Felix Creutzig

Understanding cities as complex systems, sustainable urban planning depends on reliable high-resolution data, for example of the building…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0240738 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Urban density and spatial planning: The unforeseen impacts of Dutch devolution
October 15, 2020 Jip Claassens, Eric Koomen, Jan Rouwendal

National spatial planning has strongly influenced urban development and open space preservation in the Netherlands since the 1950s and…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0239699 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE City size and the spreading of COVID-19 in Brazil
September 23, 2020 Haroldo V. Ribeiro, Andre S. Sunahara, Jack Sutton, Matjaž Perc, Quentin S. Hanley

The current outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an unprecedented example of how fast an infectious disease can spread…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0239371 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Analysis of land cover evolution within the built-up areas of provincial capital cities in northeastern China based on nighttime light data and Landsat data
October 1, 2020 Zhiwei Xie, Yaohui Han, Lishuang Sun, Jiwei Ping

Mastering the evolution of urban land cover is important for urban management and planning. In this paper, a method for analyzing land…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0239319 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Ranking places in attributed temporal urban mobility networks
October 14, 2020 Mirco Nanni, Leandro Tortosa, José F. Vicent, Gevorg Yeghikyan

Drawing on the recent advances in complex network theory, urban mobility flow patterns, typically encoded as origin-destination (OD)…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0238143 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Estimation of the shared mobility demand based on the daily regularity of the urban mobility and the similarity of individual trips
September 17, 2020 Cyril Veve, Nicolas Chiabaut

Even if shared mobility services are encouraged by transportation policies, they remain underused and inefficient transportation modes…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0236517 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE How weaponizing disinformation can bring down a city’s power grid
August 12, 2020 Gururaghav Raman, Bedoor AlShebli, Marcin Waniek, Talal Rahwan, Jimmy Chih-Hsien Peng

Social media has made it possible to manipulate the masses via disinformation and fake news at an unprecedented scale. This is…
Image credit
10.1371/journal.pone.0235732 CC BY 4.0

PLOS ONE Modeling future spread of infections via mobile geolocation data and population dynamics. An application to COVID-19 in Brazil
July 16, 2020 Pedro S. Peixoto, Diego Marcondes, Cláudia Peixoto, Sérgio M. Oliva

Mobile geolocation data is a valuable asset in the assessment of movement patterns of a population. Once a highly contagious disease takes…

Open your research for discovery.

Submit your research to PLOS ONE.

Submit now!

Follow PLOS ONE on Twitter

To keep up-to-date on the latest research.