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Dresden 2017 – scientific programme

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 15: Focus Session: Cities as complex systems

SOE 15.2: Talk

Wednesday, March 22, 2017, 15:15–15:30, GÖR 226

The city in 2 and 3 dimensions: monocentric analysis and scaling of land use and population density — •Rémi Lemoy and Geoffrey Caruso — University of Luxembourg, Maison des Sciences Humaines, 11 Porte des Sciences, L-4366 Esch-Belval, Luxembourg

In this work we study the profile of land use and population density in European cities with respect to the distance to the city centre. We use the GMES Urban Atlas database, providing a precise description of land use at 5m resolution in the 300 major European urban areas (more than 100.000 inhabitants). We combine this dataset with population density from the Geostat population grid, which covers the whole of European Union with a 1km2 resolution. Population is allocated proportionally to surface and weighted by soil sealing and density classes of the GMES data.

We analyse the evolution with distance to the city centre of population density and of the share of artificial land. We analyse the scaling of these curves with respect to city population. We find that land use curves tend to scale (in 2 dimensions) like the square root of city population. Population curves tend to scale (in 3 dimensions) like the city population to a power close to 1/3.

These results allow us to propose a simple intra-urban description of a representative European city, whose size can be defined based on the scaling relationships we obtain. This is useful for the calibration and validation of monocentric urban economic models. Further, our analysis provides a coherent definition of cities of different sizes and hence a new way to interrogate inter-urban scaling laws or Zipf’s law.

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