This collection provides a contemporary excerpt of “Cities as complex systems”. The contributions have been submitted between April and…
Cities as Complex Systems
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.
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PLOS ONE Cities as complex systems—Collection overview
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PLOS ONE Leveraging insurance customer data to characterize socioeconomic indicators of Swiss municipalities
The availability of reliable socioeconomic data is critical for the design of urban policies and the implementation of location-based…
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PLOS ONE How to tackle complexity in urban climate resilience? Negotiating climate science, adaptation and multi-level governance in India
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…
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PLOS ONE A proposed population-health based metric for evaluating representativeness of air quality monitoring in cities: Using Hong Kong as a demonstration
City air quality monitoring (AQM) network are typically sparsely distributed due to high operation costs. It is of the question of how…
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PLOS ONE The heartbeat of the city
Human activity is organised around daily and weekly cycles, which should, in turn, dominate all types of social interactions, such as…
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PLOS ONE Association between population distribution and urban GDP scaling
Urban scaling and Zipf’s law are two fundamental paradigms for the science of cities. These laws have mostly been investigated…
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PLOS ONE Comparison of blue-green solutions for urban flood mitigation: A multi-city large-scale analysis
Flooding risk in cities has been recently exacerbated by increased urbanization and climate change, often with catastrophic consequences…
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PLOS ONE Modelling urban vibrancy with mobile phone and OpenStreetMap data
The concept of urban vibrancy has become increasingly important in the study of cities. A vibrant urban environment is an area of a city…
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PLOS ONE The evolution of built-up areas in Ghana since 1975
We use high resolution satellite data on the proportion of buildings in a 250x250 meter cell to study the evolution of human settlement in…
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PLOS ONE Impacts of California Proposition 47 on crime in Santa Monica, California
We examine patterns of reported crime in Santa Monica, California before and after the passage of Proposition 47, a 2014 initiative that…
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PLOS ONE A city of cities: Measuring how 15-minutes urban accessibility shapes human mobility in Barcelona
As cities expand, human mobility has become a central focus of urban planning and policy making to make cities more inclusive and…
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PLOS ONE Clustered embedding using deep learning to analyze urban mobility based on complex transportation data
Urban mobility is a vital aspect of any city and often influences its physical shape as well as its level of economic and social…
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PLOS ONE City size based scaling of the urban internal nodes layout
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,…
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PLOS ONE Urban attractors: Discovering patterns in regions of attraction in cities
Understanding the dynamics by which urban areas attract visitors is important in today’s cities that are continuously increasing in…
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PLOS ONE Analysis on the imbalance of population flow network during the Spring Festival travel rush in China in 2015
This paper analyzes the imbalance of interprovincial population flow during the Spring Festival travel rush in China, using big data…
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PLOS ONE Societal context-dependent multi-modal transportation network augmentation in Johannesburg, South Africa
In most developing countries, formal and informal transportation schemes coexist without effective and smart integration. In this paper,…
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PLOS ONE Ubiquitous digital technologies and spatial structure; an update
This paper examines the impact of widespread adoption of information and communication technologies (ICT) on urban structure worldwide.…
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PLOS ONE Graph-based ahead monitoring of vulnerabilities in large dynamic transportation networks
Betweenness Centrality (BC) has proven to be a fundamental metric in many domains to identify the components (nodes) of a system modelled…
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PLOS ONE Towards routine, city-scale accessibility metrics: Graph theoretic interpretations of pedestrian access using personalized pedestrian network analysis
A wide range of analytical methods applied to urban systems address the modeling of pedestrian behavior. These include methods for…
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PLOS ONE Topological indexes and community structure for urban mobility networks: Variations in a business day
Topological analysis and community detection in mobility complex networks have an essential role in many contexts, from economics to the…
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PLOS ONE Analysis of mobility homophily in Stockholm based on social network data
We present a novel metric for measuring relative connection between parts of a city using geotagged Twitter data as a proxy for…
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PLOS ONE The sociospatial factors of death: Analyzing effects of geospatially-distributed variables in a Bayesian mortality model for Hong Kong
Human mortality is in part a function of multiple socioeconomic factors that differ both spatially and temporally. Adjusting for other…
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PLOS ONE Multifractal scaling analyses of urban street network structure: The cases of twelve megacities in China
Traffic networks have been proved to be fractal systems. However, previous studies mainly focused on monofractal networks, while complex…
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PLOS ONE Spatial dependence in the rank-size distribution of cities – weak but not negligible
Power law distributions characterise several natural and social phenomena. Zipf’s law for cities is one of those. The study views the…
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PLOS ONE Unsupervised learning of Swiss population spatial distribution
The paper deals with the analysis of spatial distribution of Swiss population using fractal concepts and unsupervised learning algorithms.…
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PLOS ONE Machine learning for buildings’ characterization and power-law recovery of urban metrics
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…
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PLOS ONE Cascading dominates large-scale disruptions in transport over complex networks
The core functionality of many socio-technical systems, such as supply chains, (inter)national trade and human mobility, concern transport…
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PLOS ONE Large-scale simulation of traffic flow using Markov model
Modeling and simulating movement of vehicles in established transportation infrastructures, especially in large urban road networks is an…
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PLOS ONE INFEKTA—An agent-based model for transmission of infectious diseases: The COVID-19 case in Bogotá, Colombia
The transmission dynamics of the coronavirus—COVID-19—have challenged humankind at almost every level. Currently, research groups around…
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PLOS ONE A Markov model of urban evolution: Neighbourhood change as a complex process
This paper seeks to advance neighbourhood change research and complexity theories of cities by developing and exploring a Markov model of…
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PLOS ONE Automated identification of urban substructure for comparative analysis
Neighborhoods are the building blocks of cities, and thus significantly impact urban planning from infrastructure deployment to service…
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PLOS ONE Connectivity assessment and prioritization of urban grasslands as a helpful tool for effective management of urban ecosystem services
Urban grasslands are usually managed as short-cut lawns and have limited biodiversity. Urban grasslands with low-intensity management are…
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PLOS ONE Metropolitan age-specific mortality trends at borough and neighborhood level: The case of Mexico City
Understanding the spatial and temporal patterns of mortality rates in a highly heterogeneous metropolis, is a matter of public policy…
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PLOS ONE Black Rock City versus Manhattan: An economist’s view
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…
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PLOS ONE Modeling adaptive reversible lanes: A cellular automata approach
Dealing with traffic congestion is one of the most pressing challenges for cities. Transport authorities have implemented several…
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PLOS ONE Applying machine learning and geolocation techniques to social media data (Twitter) to develop a resource for urban planning
With all the recent attention focused on big data, it is easy to overlook that basic vital statistics remain difficult to obtain in most…
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PLOS ONE StationRank: Aggregate dynamics of the Swiss railway
Increasing availability and quality of actual, as opposed to scheduled, open transport data offers new possibilities for capturing the…
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PLOS ONE Perception of urban subdivisions in pedestrian movement simulation
The perception of urban subdivisions, deriving from regionalisation processes and the identification of separating elements (barriers),…
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PLOS ONE Cities: Complexity, theory and history
In recent decades researchers in a variety of disciplines have developed a new “urban science,” the central goal of which is to build…
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PLOS ONE The dynamics of food shopping behavior: Exploring travel patterns in low-income Detroit neighborhoods experiencing extreme disinvestment using agent-based modeling
Only a handful of studies have leveraged agent-based models (ABMs) to examine public health outcomes and policy interventions associated…
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PLOS ONE Spatial interactions in urban scaling laws
Analyses of urban scaling laws assume that observations in different cities are independent of the existence of nearby cities. Here we…
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PLOS ONE Dynamic measures for transportation networks
Most complex network analyses of transportation systems use simplified static representations obtained from existing connections in a time…
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PLOS ONE Venues and segregation: A revised Schelling model
This paper examines an important but underappreciated mechanism affecting urban segregation and integration: urban venues. The venue- an…
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PLOS ONE A Gini approach to spatial CO2 emissions
Combining global gridded population and fossil fuel based CO2 emission data at 1 km scale, we investigate the spatial origin of CO2…
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PLOS ONE Exploring the changing geographical pattern of international scientific collaborations through the prism of cities
Science is becoming increasingly international in terms of breaking down walls in its pursuit of high impact. Despite geographical…
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PLOS ONE Human mobility and urban malaria risk in the main transmission hotspot of Amazonian Brazil
Malaria in the Amazon is often perceived as an exclusively rural disease, but transmission has been increasingly documented within and…
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PLOS ONE Learning from urban form to predict building heights
Understanding cities as complex systems, sustainable urban planning depends on reliable high-resolution data, for example of the building…
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PLOS ONE Urban density and spatial planning: The unforeseen impacts of Dutch devolution
National spatial planning has strongly influenced urban development and open space preservation in the Netherlands since the 1950s and…
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PLOS ONE City size and the spreading of COVID-19 in Brazil
The current outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an unprecedented example of how fast an infectious disease can spread…
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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
Mastering the evolution of urban land cover is important for urban management and planning. In this paper, a method for analyzing land…
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PLOS ONE Ranking places in attributed temporal urban mobility networks
Drawing on the recent advances in complex network theory, urban mobility flow patterns, typically encoded as origin-destination (OD)…
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PLOS ONE Estimation of the shared mobility demand based on the daily regularity of the urban mobility and the similarity of individual trips
Even if shared mobility services are encouraged by transportation policies, they remain underused and inefficient transportation modes…
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PLOS ONE How weaponizing disinformation can bring down a city’s power grid
Social media has made it possible to manipulate the masses via disinformation and fake news at an unprecedented scale. This is…
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PLOS ONE Modeling future spread of infections via mobile geolocation data and population dynamics. An application to COVID-19 in Brazil
Mobile geolocation data is a valuable asset in the assessment of movement patterns of a population. Once a highly contagious disease takes…