Abstract
Cities are among the best examples of complex systems. The adaptive components of a city, such as its people, firms, institutions, and physical structures, form intricate and often non-intuitive interdependencies with one another. These interdependencies can be quantified and represented as links of a network that give visibility to otherwise cryptic structural elements of urban systems. Here we use aspects of information theory to elucidate the interdependence network among labor skills, illuminating parts of the hidden economic structure of cities. Using pairwise interdependencies we compute an aggregate, skills-based measure of system “tightness” of a city’s labor force, capturing the degree of integration or internal connectedness of a city’s economy. We find that urban economies with higher tightness tend to be more productive in terms of higher GDP per capita. However, related work has shown that cities with higher system tightness are also more negatively affected by shocks. Thus, our skills-based metric may offer additional insights into a city’s resilience. Finally, we demonstrate how viewing the web of interdependent skills as a weighted network can lead to additional insights about cities and their economies.
Highlights
Cities are the driving force behind many of humanity’s problems today [1,2]
It is imperative that we develop a deeper understanding of urban structures, how those structures respond to shocks, and how policy makers might alter those structures to enhance a city’s resilience [6,7]
It is these less obvious structural components of cities that we seek to understand, how they respond to different shocks and how they contribute to the resilience of cities
Summary
Cities are the driving force behind many of humanity’s problems today [1,2]. Yet they are a key source of potential solutions, and their welfare and sustainability are critical for humanity’s future [3,4]. Distributions of employment across industries that remain relatively stable over time can be viewed as part of a city’s economic structure It is these less obvious structural components of cities that we seek to understand, how they respond to different shocks and how they contribute to the resilience of cities. We implement an emerging technique that uses distributions of workers by occupation to understand structural elements of an urban economy [12,13,14,15] One use of this technique has been to measure the level of interconnectedness within an urban economy’s workforce, revealing that interconnectedness, or economic tightness, is positively correlated with more severe declines in economic performance following a shock [16]. We compare a city’s skills-based economic tightness to measures of productivity, to response to an economic shock, and to previously used calculations of economic tightness based on occupations
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