Modelling urban networks at mega-regional scale: Are increasingly complex urban systems sustainable?

Are the dynamics of mega-regions sustainable or not? We explore the hypothesis that increasing complexity in mega-regions implies less demands on resources needed to generate organized information, thereby making the systems more efficient and stable. This article aims to identify structural indicators for measuring urban networks at the mega-regional scale. We use night-time light data from the broad band near-visible infrared channel of the DMSP-OLS to monitor the dynamics of urbanization. We study the urban networks as graphs, where nodes are cities, and the main road and railway infrastructures represent the edges. We propose four indicators for measuring the complexity, polycentricity,…