Abstract
We determine the functional form and scaling law of radial artificial land use profiles in 300 European functional urban areas (FUAs). These profiles, starting from a fully artificial surface in the city center, decrease exponentially, the faster the smaller the city. More precisely, the characteristic decrease distance scales like the square root of total population, meaning that the artificial surface of cities is proportional to their population. This also means that the amount of artificial land per capita is independent of city size, and that larger cities are not more or less parsimonious in terms of land use than smaller ones.
Highlights
We determine the functional form and scaling law of radial artificial land use profiles in 300 European functional urban areas (FUAs)
The results, which consist in two fitting parameters for each city, are illustrated on Fig. 1. We study how these fitted parameters evolve with total population N, in order to find their scaling laws
We study for each individual city and each model two indicators of the goodness of our fits: the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC), and the usual R2—even though we note that the R2 might not be as relevant for non-linear models as for linear o nes[19], we still consider it in both cases
Summary
We determine the functional form and scaling law of radial artificial land use profiles in 300 European functional urban areas (FUAs). In order to assess this scaling law more precisely, we subsequently fit the estimated characteristic decrease distances lN of the linear (L) and non-linear (NL) models against total population N (using a linear fit of the logarithms of lN and N), following log(lN ) ∼ log(l1) + log N, lN
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