The Size, Scale, and Shape of Cities
Michael Batty
Despite a century of effort, our understanding of how cities
evolve is still woefully inadequate. Recent research, however,
suggests that cities are complex systems that mainly grow from
the bottom up, their size and shape following well-defined scaling
laws that result from intense competition for space. An integrated
theory of how cities evolve, linking urban economics and transportation
behavior to developments in network science, allometric growth,
and fractal geometry, is being slowly developed. This science
provides new insights into the resource limits facing cities
in terms of the meaning of density, compactness, and sprawl,
and related questions of sustainability. It has the potential
to enrich current approaches to city planning and replace traditional
top-down strategies with realistic city plans that benefit all
city dwellers.
