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Evolution of urban scaling: Evidence from Brazil

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  • Joao Meirelles
  • Camilo Rodrigues Neto
  • Fernando Fagundes Ferreira
  • Fabiano Lemes Ribeiro
  • Claudia Rebeca Binder

Abstract

During the last years, the new science of cities has been established as a fertile quantitative approach to systematically understand the urban phenomena. One of its main pillars is the proposition that urban systems display universal scaling behavior regarding socioeconomic, infrastructural and individual basic services variables. This paper discusses the extension of the universality proposition by testing it against a broad range of urban metrics in a developing country urban system. We present an exploration of the scaling exponents for over 60 variables for the Brazilian urban system. Estimating those exponents is challenging from the technical point of view because the Brazilian municipalities’ definition follows local political criteria and does not regard characteristics of the landscape, density, and basic utilities. As Brazilian municipalities can deviate significantly from urban settlements, urban-like municipalities were selected based on a systematic density cut-off procedure and the scaling exponents were estimated for this new subset of municipalities. To validate our findings we compared the results for overlaying variables with other studies based on alternative methods. It was found that the analyzed socioeconomic variables follow a superlinear scaling relationship with the population size, and most of the infrastructure and individual basic services variables follow expected sublinear and linear scaling, respectively. However, some infrastructural and individual basic services variables deviated from their expected regimes, challenging the universality hypothesis of urban scaling. We propose that these deviations are a product of top-down decisions/policies. Our analysis spreads over a time-range of 10 years, what is not enough to draw conclusive observations, nevertheless we found hints that the scaling exponent of these variables are evolving towards the expected scaling regime, indicating that the deviations might be temporally constrained and that the urban systems might eventually reach the expected scaling regime.

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  • Joao Meirelles & Camilo Rodrigues Neto & Fernando Fagundes Ferreira & Fabiano Lemes Ribeiro & Claudia Rebeca Binder, 2018. "Evolution of urban scaling: Evidence from Brazil," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 13(10), pages 1-15, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0204574
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0204574
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    2. Elisa Heinrich Mora & Jacob J. Jackson & Cate Heine & Geoffrey B. West & Vicky Chuqiao Yang & Christopher P. Kempes, 2021. "Scaling of Urban Income Inequality in the United States," Papers 2102.13150, arXiv.org.
    3. Xianyuan Chang & Zhaoping Wu & Yi Chen & Yuanyuan Du & Longfei Shang & Ying Ge & Jie Chang & Guofu Yang, 2021. "The Booming Number of Museums and Their Inequality Changes in China," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(24), pages 1-19, December.
    4. Joao Meirelles & Fabiano L. Ribeiro & Gabriel Cury & Claudia R. Binder & Vinicius M. Netto, 2021. "More from Less? Environmental Rebound Effects of City Size," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(7), pages 1-20, April.
    5. Li, Zekun & Chen, Zhenhua, 2023. "Predicting the future development scale of high-speed rail through the urban scaling law," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 174(C).
    6. Xu, Gang & Xu, Zhibang & Gu, Yanyan & Lei, Weiqian & Pan, Yupiao & Liu, Jie & Jiao, Limin, 2020. "Scaling laws in intra-urban systems and over time at the district level in Shanghai, China," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 560(C).

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