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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.
Highlights
Today, more than half of the world population lives in cities [1] and this share is likely to increase in the years
Some infrastructural and basic individual services variables presents a non-habitual scaling exponent across the cut-off process. This observation leads us to propose a general explanation for deviations of the scaling exponents in agreement with the urban scaling proposition and economic theory: infrastructural variables that do not emerge from local level interaction, but come from a top-down political decision and are constrained by state budgets, will tend to deviate from the expected scaling regime
We found that some infrastructural and basic individual services variables did not scale as proposed in literature. This observation imposes some limits to the universality hypothesis, which postulates that dense human settlements would generate the same scaling patterns regardless of the specific characteristics of the urban system
Summary
More than half of the world population lives in cities [1] and this share is likely to increase in the years. Urban data had become increasingly accessible in a structured and machine-readable way These newly available datasets, combined with approaches from complexity sciences are setting the ground for a new science of cities [2, 3]. In this recent scientific approach to urban studies, a paradigm has arisen, which focuses not on the particularities of cities, but on their common patterns It considers that the form and the function of urban systems are caused by universal laws that emerge from elementary local level interactions [2,3,4,5]. As the possibility of formalizing a universal law of urban growth, in terms of its socio-economic and ecological impacts, might have a large implication for urban planning, it is key to understand whether this universality plays out for cities in countries with different development stages (i.e. BRICS countries, developing countries) and if the findings hold true for other variables
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