Epidemiological modelling of the 2005 French riots: a spreading wave and the role of contagion.

ABSTRACT: As a large-scale instance of dramatic collective behaviour, the 2005 French riots started in a poor suburb of Paris, then spread in all of France, lasting about three weeks. Remarkably, although there were no displacements of rioters, the riot activity did travel. Access to daily national police data has allowed us to explore the dynamics of riot propagation. Here we show that an epidemic-like model, with just a few parameters and a single sociological variable characterizing neighbourhood deprivation, accounts quantitatively for the full spatio-temporal dynamics of the riots. This is the first time that such data-driven modelling involving contagion both within and between cities (through geographic proximity or media) at the scale of a country, and on a daily basis, is performed. Moreove

SUBMITTER: Bonnasse-Gahot L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5758762 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature