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  • Luís M. A. Bettencourt is the Inaugural Director the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation at the University of Chi... moreedit
Agglomeration is the tell-tale sign of cities and urbanization. Identifying and measuring agglomeration economies has been achieved by a variety of means and by various disciplines, including urban economics, quantitative geography, and... more
Agglomeration is the tell-tale sign of cities and urbanization. Identifying and measuring agglomeration economies has been achieved by a variety of means and by various disciplines, including urban economics, quantitative geography, and regional science. Agglomeration is typically expressed as the non-linear dependence of many different urban quantities on city size, proxied by population. The identification and measurement of agglomeration effects is of course dependent on the choice of spatial units. Metropolitan areas (or their equivalent) have been the preferred spatial units for urban scaling modeling. The many issues surrounding the delineation of metropolitan areas have tended to obscure that urban scaling is principally about the measurable consequences of social and economic interactions embedded in physical space and facilitated by physical proximity and infrastructure. These generative processes obviously must exist in the spatial subcomponents of metropolitan areas. Using data for counties and urbanized areas in the United States, we show that the generative processes that give rise to scaling effects are not an artifact of metropolitan definitions and exist at smaller spatial scales.
In recent decades researchers in several disciplines have promoted ‘urban science’ to acknowledge the advantages of multidisciplinary approaches and the expanding ability to collect data for contem...
There is a growing recognition that responding to climate change necessitates urban adaptation. We sketch a transdisciplinary research effort, arguing that actionable research on urban adaptation needs to recognize the nature of cities as... more
There is a growing recognition that responding to climate change necessitates urban adaptation. We sketch a transdisciplinary research effort, arguing that actionable research on urban adaptation needs to recognize the nature of cities as social networks embedded in physical space. Given the pace, scale and socioeconomic outcomes of urbanization in the Global South, the specificities and history of its cities must be central to the study of how well-known agglomeration effects can facilitate adaptation. The proposed effort calls for the co-creation of knowledge involving scientists and stakeholders, especially those historically excluded from the design and implementation of urban development policies.
Sustainable urban systems (SUS) science is a new science integrating work across established and emerging disciplines, using diverse methods, and addressing issues at local, regional, national, and global scales. Advancing SUS requires... more
Sustainable urban systems (SUS) science is a new science integrating work across established and emerging disciplines, using diverse methods, and addressing issues at local, regional, national, and global scales. Advancing SUS requires the next generation of scholars and practitioners to excel at synthesis across disciplines and possess the skills to innovate in the realms of research, policy, and stakeholder engagement. We outline key tenets of graduate education in SUS, informed by historical and global perspectives. The sketch is an invitation to discuss how graduates in SUS should be trained to engage with the challenges and opportunities presented by continuing urbanization.
Presently, many island communities are largely dependent on fossil fuel resources for energy, leaving the abundance of renewable energy resources largely untapped. Although various solar energy potential modeling tools have been... more
Presently, many island communities are largely dependent on fossil fuel resources for energy, leaving the abundance of renewable energy resources largely untapped. Although various solar energy potential modeling tools have been developed, most require high-resolution data, which do not presently exist for many developing countries or remote areas. Here, we calculate the potential of rooftop solar systems using low-cost, readily obtainable data and methods. This approach can be replicated by local communities and decision-makers to obtain an estimate of solar potential before investing in more detailed analysis. We illustrate the use of these methods on the two major urban centers on the Galápagos Islands (Ecuador), Puerto Baquerizo Moreno and Puerto Ayora. Our results show that a minimum of 21% and 27% of the total rooftop area must be covered with today's solar energy production technology to meet the current electricity demand of Puerto Baquerizo Moreno and Puerto Ayora, resp...
Island systems present a singular opportunity for understanding processes of human development and for exploring the conditions that can make such processes sustainable. In this chapter, I attempt to summarize many of the points made... more
Island systems present a singular opportunity for understanding processes of human development and for exploring the conditions that can make such processes sustainable. In this chapter, I attempt to summarize many of the points made throughout this book to provide a methodology for achieving sustainable development in island systems, such as the Galapagos. The methodology proposed relies on the construction of a comprehensive input-output matrix for an island, coupled to a detailed, spatiotemporally explicit model of resource use and human occupation. This matrix maps inputs to outputs such as economic activity, migration, and pollution, via internal causal processes in human settlements. At each step – inputs, outputs, and internal processes – the variables involved are observable and measurable, supporting a process of continuous improvement in data collection and modeling. Such a systems-level model can then be used to explore ways to eliminate adverse outputs while supporting human and natural development and biodiversity, in an empirically transparent and testable way. I discuss some of the challenges and trade-offs in the construction of these models as the basis for a general strategy for achieving sustainability in island systems.
The current outbreak of COVID-19 poses an unprecedented global health and economic threat to interconnected human societies. Strategies for controlling the outbreak rely on social distancing and face covering measures which largely... more
The current outbreak of COVID-19 poses an unprecedented global health and economic threat to interconnected human societies. Strategies for controlling the outbreak rely on social distancing and face covering measures which largely disconnect the social network fabric of cities. We demonstrate that early in the US outbreak, COVID-19 spread faster on average in larger cities and discuss the implications of these observations, emphasizing the need for faster responses to novel infectious diseases in larger cities.
Growth, statistics, and scaling are shown to be interdependent facets of the same underlying statistical dynamics of cities.
Abstract The emergence of India as an urbanized nation is one of the most significant socioeconomic and political processes of the 21st century. An essential feature of India’s urbanization has been the growth and persistence of slums in... more
Abstract The emergence of India as an urbanized nation is one of the most significant socioeconomic and political processes of the 21st century. An essential feature of India’s urbanization has been the growth and persistence of slums in its fast-developing cities. Whether living conditions in Indian slums constitute a path to human development or a poverty trap to much of their population is therefore an issue of vital importance. Here, we analyse data from the Census of India using the framework of urban scaling to systematically characterize the relative properties of Indian urban slums, focusing on attributes of neighborhoods such as access to basic services like water, sanitation, and electricity. We find that slums in larger cities attract more migrants and offer, on average, higher levels of service access than those in smaller cities. We posit that these outcomes are a consequence of both agglomeration effects in larger cities and sub-linear scaling of infrastructure as predicted by urban scaling theory. We also find consistent under-performance in service access in slums, in comparison with non-slum neighborhoods in the same cities. However, urban slums, on average, offer greater access to services than rural areas. This situation, which we quantify systematically, may help explain why larger Indian cities have remained attractive to rural populations in terms of living standards, beyond the need for an economic income premium. Finally, based on the analysis of scaling residuals, we construct a nationwide urban geography of slums, essentially finding that public service delivery in the slums of northern, central, and eastern Indian cities is, on average, poorer than slums in cities of southern and western India. Overall, these findings suggest that urban policy needs to confront two distinct kinds of urban inequity – across neighbourhoods within cities, and across city scales and levels of development.
The fast urbanization of human societies worldwide is bringing about some of the greatest historic changes in our relationship with the Earth's natural environments, with potentially irreversible and unpredictable consequences. From... more
The fast urbanization of human societies worldwide is bringing about some of the greatest historic changes in our relationship with the Earth's natural environments, with potentially irreversible and unpredictable consequences. From the human point of view urbanization is intimately connected to socio-economic development, transitioning people away from subsistence agriculture and integrating them into large-scale diversified economies. These processes change the demands placed by human societies on natural environments in terms of energy and material flows, land use and other effects associated with climate change (CO2 emissions) and loss of biodiversity. Urbanization offers at once a host of new problems and solutions. On the one hand living standards associated with developed urbanized societies are higher, usually implying greater consumption of energy and materials. On the other hand cities allow and encourage the pursuit of more efficient solutions to human settlement and ...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Over the last few decades, in disciplines as diverse as economics, geography and complex systems, a perspective has arisen proposing that many properties of cities are quantitatively predictable due to agglomeration or scaling effects.... more
Over the last few decades, in disciplines as diverse as economics, geography and complex systems, a perspective has arisen proposing that many properties of cities are quantitatively predictable due to agglomeration or scaling effects. Using new harmonized definitions for functional urban areas, we examine to what extent these ideas apply to European cities. We show that while most large urban systems in Western Europe (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK) approximately agree with theoretical expectations, the small number of cities in each nation and their natural variability preclude drawing strong conclusions. We demonstrate how this problem can be overcome so that cities from different urban systems can be pooled together to construct larger datasets. This leads to a simple statistical procedure to identify urban scaling relations, which then clearly emerge as a property of European cities. We compare the predictions of urban scaling to Zipf's law for the size distribution of ...
This paper attempts to create a first comprehensive analysis of the integrated characteristics of contemporary Indian cities, using scaling and geographical analysis over a set of diverse indicators. We use data of urban agglomerations in... more
This paper attempts to create a first comprehensive analysis of the integrated characteristics of contemporary Indian cities, using scaling and geographical analysis over a set of diverse indicators. We use data of urban agglomerations in India from the Census 2011 and from a few other sources to characterize patterns of urban population density, infrastructure, urban services, crime and technological innovation. Many of the results are in line with expectations from urban theory and with the behaviour of analogous quantities in other urban systems in both high and middle-income nations. India is a continental scale, fast developing urban system, and consequently there are also a number of interesting exceptions and surprises related to both particular quantities and strong regional patterns of variation. Specifically, these relate to the potential salience of gender and caste in driving sub-linear scaling of crime and to the geography of technological innovation. We characterize th...
Implicit biases, expressed as differential treatment towards out-group members, are pervasive in human societies. These biases are often racial or ethnic in nature and create disparities and inequities across many aspects of life. Recent... more
Implicit biases, expressed as differential treatment towards out-group members, are pervasive in human societies. These biases are often racial or ethnic in nature and create disparities and inequities across many aspects of life. Recent research has revealed that implicit biases are, for the most part, driven by social contexts and local histories. However, it has remained unclear how and if the regular ways in which human societies self-organize in cities produce systematic variation in implicit bias strength. Here we leverage extensions of the mathematical models of urban scaling theory to predict and test between-city differences in implicit racial biases. Our model comprehensively links scales of organization from city-wide infrastructure to individual psychology to quantitatively predict that cities that are (1) more populous, (2) more diverse, and (3) less segregated have lower levels of implicit biases. We find broad empirical support for each of these predictions in U.S. ci...
This study is among the first to investigate whether patterns of access to basic services could explain the disproportionately severe impact of COVID-19 in slums. Using geolocated containment zones and COVID-19 case data for Mumbai,... more
This study is among the first to investigate whether patterns of access to basic services could explain the disproportionately severe impact of COVID-19 in slums. Using geolocated containment zones and COVID-19 case data for Mumbai, India’s most populous city, we find that cases and case fatality rates are higher in slums compared to formal residential buildings. Our results show that while access to toilets for men is associated with lower COVID-19 prevalence, the effect is opposite in the case of toilets for women. This could be because limited hours for safely using toilets and higher waiting times increase risk of exposure, and women and children sharing toilet facilities results in crowding. Proximity to water pipelines has no effect on prevalence, likely because slumdwellers are disconnected from for- mal water supply networks. Indoor crowding does not seem to have an effect on case prevalence. Finally, while police capacity – measured by number of police station outposts – is associated with lower prevalence in non-slum areas, indicat- ing effective enforcement of containment, this relationship does not hold in slums. The study highlights the urgency of finding viable solutions for slum improvement and upgrading to mitigate the effects of contagion for some of the most vulnerable populations.
We apply an information theoretic treatment of action potential time series measured with microelectrode arrays to estimate the connectivity of mammalian neuronal cell assemblies grown in vitro. We infer connectivity between two neurons... more
We apply an information theoretic treatment of action potential time series measured with microelectrode arrays to estimate the connectivity of mammalian neuronal cell assemblies grown in vitro. We infer connectivity between two neurons via the measurement of the mutual information between their spike trains. In addition we measure higher point multi-informations between any two spike trains conditional on the activity of a third cell, as a means to identify and distinguish classes of functional connectivity among three neurons. The use of a conditional three-cell measure removes some interpretational shortcomings of the pairwise mutual information and sheds light into the functional connectivity arrangements of any three cells. We analyze the resultant connectivity graphs in light of other complex networks and demonstrate that, despite their ex vivo development, the connectivity maps derived from cultured neural assemblies are similar to other biological networks and display nontri...
As the matter produced in a relativistic heavy ion collision cools through the QCD phase transition, the dynamical evolution of the chiral condensate will be driven out of thermal equilibrium. As a prelude to analyzing this evolution, and... more
As the matter produced in a relativistic heavy ion collision cools through the QCD phase transition, the dynamical evolution of the chiral condensate will be driven out of thermal equilibrium. As a prelude to analyzing this evolution, and in particular as a prelude to learning how rapid the cooling must be in order for significant deviations from equilibrium to develop, we present a detailed analysis of the time-evolution of an idealized region of disoriented chiral condensate. We set up a Langevin field equation which can describe the evolution of these (or more realistic) linear sigma model configurations in contact with a heat bath representing the presence of other shorter wavelength degrees of freedom. We first analyze the model in equilibrium, paying particular attention to subtracting ultraviolet divergent classical terms and replacing them by their finite quantum counterparts. We use known results from lattice gauge theory and chiral perturbation theory to fix nonuniversal c...
Stochastic evolutions of classical field theories have recently become popular in the study of problems such as determination of the rates of topological transitions and the statistical mechanics of nonlinear coherent structures. To... more
Stochastic evolutions of classical field theories have recently become popular in the study of problems such as determination of the rates of topological transitions and the statistical mechanics of nonlinear coherent structures. To obtain high precision results from numerical calculations, a careful accounting of spacetime discreteness effects is essential, as well as the development of schemes to systematically improve convergence to the continuum. With a kink-bearing ϕ^4 field theory as the application arena, we present such an analysis for a 1+1-dimensional Langevin system. Analytical predictions and results from high resolution numerical solutions are found to be in excellent agreement.
This practitioner paper is based on the need to make sense of UN Agenda 2030 and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the city level and in an urban context. We examine the need to explain how to utilise the SDGs in strategic, tactical... more
This practitioner paper is based on the need to make sense of UN Agenda 2030 and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the city level and in an urban context. We examine the need to explain how to utilise the SDGs in strategic, tactical and operative urban development. We find that there are knowledge and practise gaps in how to localise SDGs in the urban context. This need and the lack of existing tools has led to the development of a strategic sensemaking process, which has been tested and developed with municipal and other practitioners, locally and globally. The paper presents findings from this process of development and from implementation pilots, including an SDG Sensemaking Tool (SST), a step by step iterative procedure to address these gaps. The main focus of this paper is the SDG Sensemaking process, which relies on analysing SDGs in relation to any given phenomena or project within or outside a city. The first results in this work-in-progress show that it contributes to...
During development, the mammalian brain differentiates into specialized regions with distinct functional abilities. While many factors contribute to functional specialization, we explore the effect of neuronal density on the development... more
During development, the mammalian brain differentiates into specialized regions with distinct functional abilities. While many factors contribute to functional specialization, we explore the effect of neuronal density on the development of neuronal interactions in vitro. Two types of cortical networks, dense and sparse, with 50,000 and 12,000 total cells respectively, are studied. Activation graphs that represent pairwise neuronal interactions are constructed using a competitive first response model. These graphs reveal that, during development in vitro, dense networks form activation connections earlier than sparse networks. Link entropy analysis of dense net- work activation graphs suggests that the majority of connections between electrodes are reciprocal in nature. Information theoretic measures reveal that early functional information interactions (among 3 cells) are synergetic in both dense and sparse networks. However, during later stages of development, previously synergetic...
The time evolution of the correlation functions of an ensemble of anharmonic N-component oscillators with O(N) symmetry is described by a flow equation, exact up to corrections of order $1/N^2$. We find effective irreversibility.... more
The time evolution of the correlation functions of an ensemble of anharmonic N-component oscillators with O(N) symmetry is described by a flow equation, exact up to corrections of order $1/N^2$. We find effective irreversibility. Nevertheless, analytical and numerical investigation reveals that the system does not reach thermal equilibrium for large times, even when $N\to \infty$. Depending on the initial distribution, the dynamics is asymptotically stable or it exhibits growing modes which break the conditions for the validity of the 1/N expansion for large time. We investigate both classical and quantum systems, the latter being the limit of an O(N) symmetric scalar quantum field theory in zero spatial dimensions.
A key property of modern cities is increasing returns to scale—the finding that many socioeconomic outputs increase more rapidly than their population size. Recent theoretical work proposes that this phenomenon is the result of general... more
A key property of modern cities is increasing returns to scale—the finding that many socioeconomic outputs increase more rapidly than their population size. Recent theoretical work proposes that this phenomenon is the result of general network effects typical of human social networks embedded in space and, thus, is not necessarily limited to modern settlements. We examine the extent to which increasing returns are apparent in archaeological settlement data from the pre-Hispanic Basin of Mexico. We review previous work on the quantitative relationship between population size and average settled area in this society and then present a general analysis of their patterns of monument construction and house sizes. Estimated scaling parameter values and residual statistics support the hypothesis that increasing returns to scale characterized various forms of socioeconomic production available in the archaeological record and are found to be consistent with key expectations from settlement ...
Background: Intricate maps of science have been created from citation data to visualize the structure of scientific activity. However, most scientific publications are now accessed online. Scholarly web portals record detailed log data at... more
Background: Intricate maps of science have been created from citation data to visualize the structure of scientific activity. However, most scientific publications are now accessed online. Scholarly web portals record detailed log data at a scale that exceeds the number of all existing citations combined. Such log data is recorded immediately upon publication and keeps track of the sequences of user requests (clickstreams) that are issued by a variety of users across many different domains. Given these advantages of log datasets over citation data, we investigate whether they can produce high-resolution, more current maps of science. Methodology: Over the course of 2007 and 2008, we collected nearly 1 billion user interactions recorded by the scholarly web portals of some of the most significant publishers, aggregators and institutional consortia. The resulting reference data set covers a significant part of world-wide use of scholarly web portals in 2006, and provides a balanced co...
The concepts of sustainable development have experienced extraordinary success since their advent in the 1980s. They are now an integral part of the agenda of governments and corporations and their goals have become central to the mission... more
The concepts of sustainable development have experienced extraordinary success since their advent in the 1980s. They are now an integral part of the agenda of governments and corporations and their goals have become central to the mission of research laboratories and universities worldwide. However, it remains unclear how far the field has progressed as a scientific discipline, especially given its ambitious agenda of integrating theory, applied science and policy, making it relevant for development globally and generating a new interdisciplinary synthesis across fields as diverse as ecology, the social sciences and engineering. To address these questions we assembled a corpus of scholarly publications in the field and analyzed its temporal evolution, geographic distribution, disciplinary composition and collaboration structure. We show that sustainability science has been growing explosively since the late 1980s when foundational publications in the field increased its pull to new ...
Email is an increasingly important and ubiquitous means of communication, both facilitating contact between private individuals and enabling rises in the productivity of organizations. However the relentless rise of automatic unauthorized... more
Email is an increasingly important and ubiquitous means of communication, both facilitating contact between private individuals and enabling rises in the productivity of organizations. However the relentless rise of automatic unauthorized emails, a.k.a. spam is eroding away much of the attractiveness of email communication. Most of the attention dedicated to date to spam detection has focused on the content of the emails or on the addresses or domains associated with spam senders. Although methods based on these - easily changeable - identifiers work reasonably well they miss on the fundamental nature of spam as an opportunistic relationship, very different from the normal mutual relations between senders and recipients of legitimate email. Here we present a comprehensive graph theoretical analysis of email traffic that captures these properties quantitatively. We identify sev eral simple metrics that serve both to distinguish between spam and legitimate email and to provide a stati...
We propose a new spam detection algorithm that uses structural relationships between senders and recipients of email as the basis for spam detection. A unifying representation of users and receivers in the vectorial space of their... more
We propose a new spam detection algorithm that uses structural relationships between senders and recipients of email as the basis for spam detection. A unifying representation of users and receivers in the vectorial space of their contacts is constructed, that leads to a natural definition of similarity between them. This similarity is then used to group email senders and recipients into clusters. Historical information about the messages sent and received by the clusters is obtained by forwarding messages to an auxiliary spam detection algorithm and this information is used to reclassify messages. In the framework proposed, our algorithm aims at correcting misclassifications from an auxiliary algorithm. A simulation is performed based on actual data collected from an SMTP server from a large University. We show that our approach is able reduce false positives, produced by the auxiliary classification algorithm, up to about 60%.
One of the most commonly-observed properties of human settlements, both past and present, is the tendency for larger settlements to display higher population densities. Work in urban science and archaeology suggests this densification... more
One of the most commonly-observed properties of human settlements, both past and present, is the tendency for larger settlements to display higher population densities. Work in urban science and archaeology suggests this densification pattern reflects an emergent spatial equilibrium where individuals balance movement costs with social interaction benefits, leading to increases in aggregate productivity and social interdependence. In this context, it is perhaps not surprising that the more temporary camps created by mobile hunters and gatherers exhibit a tendency to become less dense with their population size. Here we examine why this difference occurs and consider conditions under which hunter-gatherer groups may transition to sedentism and densification. We investigate the relationship between population and area in mobile hunter-gatherer camps using a dataset, representing a large cross-cultural sample, derived from the ethnographic literature. We present a model based on the interplay between social interactions and scalar stress for the relationship between camp area and group size that describes the observed patterns among mobile hunter-gatherers. The model highlights the tradeoffs between the costs and benefits of proximity and interaction that are common to all human aggregations and specifies the constraints that must be overcome for economies of scale and cooperation to emerge.
The recent growth of high-resolution spatial data, especially in developing urban environments, is enabling new approaches to civic activism, urban planning and the provision of services necessary for sustainable development. A special... more
The recent growth of high-resolution spatial data, especially in developing urban environments, is enabling new approaches to civic activism, urban planning and the provision of services necessary for sustainable development. A special area of great potential and urgent need deals with urban expansion through informal settlements (slums). These neighborhoods are too often characterized by a lack of connections, both physical and socioeconomic, with detrimental effects to residents and their cities. Here, we show how a scalable computational approach based on the topological properties of digital maps can identify local infrastructural deficits and propose context-appropriate minimal solutions. We analyze 1 terabyte of OpenStreetMap (OSM) crowdsourced data to create worldwide indices of street block accessibility and local cadastral maps and propose infrastructure extensions with a focus on 120 Low and Middle Income Countries (LMIC) in the Global South. We illustrate how the lack of ...
It is commonly assumed that cities are detrimental to mental health. However, the evidence remains inconsistent and, at most, makes the case for differences between rural and urban environments as a whole. Here, we propose a model of... more
It is commonly assumed that cities are detrimental to mental health. However, the evidence remains inconsistent and, at most, makes the case for differences between rural and urban environments as a whole. Here, we propose a model of depression driven by an individual's accumulated experience mediated by social networks. The connection between observed systematic variations in socioeconomic networks and built environments with city size provides a link between urbanization and mental health. Surprisingly, this model predicts lower depression rates in larger cities. We confirm this prediction for US cities using three independent datasets. These results are consistent with other behaviors associated with denser socioeconomic networks and suggest that larger cities provide a buffer against depression. This approach introduces a systematic framework for conceptualizing and modeling mental health in complex physical and social networks, producing testable predictions for environment...

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One of the most common tendencies of human settlements is for larger settlements to display higher population densities. Work in urban science and archaeology suggests that this densification pattern reflects an emergent spatial... more
One of the most common tendencies of human settlements is for larger settlements to display higher population densities. Work in urban science and archaeology suggests that this densification pattern reflects an emergent spatial equilibrium where individuals balance movement costs with social interaction benefits, leading to increases in aggregate productivity and social interdependence. The temporary camps created by hunters and gatherers exhibit a tendency to become less dense with their population size. The different manner in which hunter-gatherer groups express their sociality in residential space suggests that they typically lack the social structures and material technologies necessary for humans to live at greater spatial densities in permanent settlements. Here we examine why this difference occurs and consider conditions under which hunter-gatherer groups may transition to sedentism and densification. We investigate the relationship between population and area in hunter-gatherer camps using a data set representing a large cross-cultural sample derived from the ethnographic literature. We present a model based on the interplay between social interactions and scalar stress that describes the observed patterns among mobile hunter-gatherers. We find that the transition to a densification scheme does not necessary involve domestic food production, only surpluses and storable resources.
Urban agglomeration economies make cities central to theories of modern economic growth. There is historical evidence for the presence of Smithian growth and agglomeration effects in English towns c.1450-1670, but seminal assessments deny... more
Urban agglomeration economies make cities central to theories of modern economic growth. There is historical evidence for the presence of Smithian growth and agglomeration effects in English towns c.1450-1670, but seminal assessments deny the presence of agglomeration effects and productivity gains to Early Modern English towns. This study evaluates the presence of increasing returns to scale (IRS) in aggregate urban economic outputs-the empirical signature of feedbacks between Smithian growth and agglomeration effects-among the towns of 16th century England. To do so, we test a model from settlement scaling theory against the 1524/5 Lay Subsidy returns. Analysis of these data indicates that Tudor towns exhibited IRS-a finding that is robust to alternative interpretations of the data. IRS holds even for the smallest towns in our sample, suggesting the absence of town size thresholds for the emergence of agglomeration effects. Spatial patterning of scaling residuals further suggests regional demand-side interactions with Smithian-agglomeration feedbacks. These findings suggest the presence of agglomeration effects and Smithian growth in pre-industrial English towns. This begs us to reconsider the economic performance of Early Modern English towns, and suggests that the qualitative economic dynamics of contemporary cities may be applicable to premodern settlements in general.
A general explanatory framework for the social processes underpinning urbanisation should account for empirical regularities that are shared among contemporary urban systems and ancient settlement systems known throughout archaeology and... more
A general explanatory framework for the social processes underpinning urbanisation should account for empirical regularities that are shared among contemporary urban systems and ancient settlement systems known throughout archaeology and history. The identification of such shared properties has been facilitated by research traditions in each field that define cities and settlements as areas that capture networks of social interaction embedded in space. Using Settlement Scaling Theory (SST)-a set of hypotheses and mathematical relationships that together generate predictions for how measurable quantitative attributes of settlements are related to their population size-we show that aggregate properties of ancient settlement systems and contemporary metropolitan systems scale up in similar ways across time, geography and culture. Settlement scaling theory thus provides a unified framework for understanding and predicting these regularities across time and space, and for identifying putative processes common to all human settlements.
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