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,…
Modelling urban networks sustainable progress
In this paper, we analyse the relations between thermodynamics and city networks: an increase in the complexity and the organized information in such urban systems leads to less demand for resources and less social entropy, which overall makes them more efficient and stable. The goal of this study is to propose a method to measuring city networks sustainable progress based on statistical models, derived from Eurostat databases and NASA satellite images, and capable of analyzing different conceptual scenarios of urban development in Europe. The obtained probability-based indices enable us to evaluate the dynamics of city networks in terms of three components of sustainable progress – economi…