Dresden 2026 – scientific programme
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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme
SOE 6: Mobility, Traffic Dynamics, Urban and Regional Systems
SOE 6.3: Talk
Tuesday, March 10, 2026, 11:15–11:30, GÖR/0226
Scaling laws beyond cities — •Yiwei Yang1, 2, Benedikt Grammer1, Rafael Prieto-Curiel3, David Frantz4, Helmut Haberl1, and Dominik Wiedenhofer1 — 1BOKU University, Vienna, Austria — 2MPG-DLU, Jena, Germany — 3CSH, Vienna, Austria — 4Trier University, Trier, Germany
Urban scaling laws reveal that larger cities tend to be more resource-efficient and innovative, but the standard framework has two well-known limitations: (1) the one-city-one-value approach assumes that the entire urban area is the only meaningful unit of analysis; (2) carefully delineated city boundaries artificially divide what is in fact a continuous human settlement system. These issues motivate examining scaling relationships within cities and across the rural-urban continuum. We hypothesize that fine-scale properties, in particular infrastructure-related attributes tied to fractal urban form, scale with population across the full fabric of human settlements. We test this using high-resolution gridded maps for the contiguous United States, analyzing how built-environment material stocks, service provisioning, and operational greenhouse gas emissions scale with population at the settlement-cell level. Through stepwise empirical tests, we not only demonstrate that scaling is present at fine spatial scales within human settlements, but also identify three important features of intra-settlement scaling. Our findings reframe the view that the city is the sole scale at which scaling laws arise, reveal pronounced intra-settlement heterogeneities, and offer practical implications for the analysis and planning of sustainable settlement development.
Keywords: intra-settlement scaling; grid-based analysis; fractal geometry; building and mobility infrastructure; population density