Scaling and universality in urban economic diversification.

ABSTRACT: Understanding cities is central to addressing major global challenges from climate change to economic resilience. Although increasingly perceived as fundamental socio-economic units, the detailed fabric of urban economic activities is only recently accessible to comprehensive analyses with the availability of large datasets. Here, we study abundances of business categories across US metropolitan statistical areas, and provide a framework for measuring the intrinsic diversity of economic activities that transcends scales of the classification scheme. A universal structure common to all cities is revealed, manifesting self-similarity in internal economic structure as well as aggregated metrics (GDP, patents, crime). We present a simple mathematical derivation of the universality, and provide

SUBMITTER: Youn H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4759798 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature