Introduction to Urban Science: Evidence and Theory of Cities as Complex Systems

individuals become connected to each other in terms of many of their daily needs,

a city, we are all interdependent, necessarily relying on each other through social, political, economic, and other connections

subjects all agents in the city to a cost-benefit logic where positive-sum gains between advantaged and disadvantaged populations become the norm.

resources grow by the accumulation of the difference between income and costs,

These logarithmic derivatives

the maximum diversity smaller the larger the superlinear scaling of cities,

How these prefactors get to change in time so that one day China may catch up with the US economically is the result of systemic processes of change and development, which we will study in chapters 5 and 9. We will see that endogenous processes of economic growth based on learning and new information, distributed across the urban system, are key.

the buildup of information with input energy in ecosystems is actually quite slow and sublinear (bS < 1).

means simply independence from initial conditions