Abstract

The scaling relations between city attributes and population are emergent and ubiquitous aspects of urban growth. Quantifying these relations and understanding their theoretical foundation, however, is difficult due to the challenge of defining city boundaries and a lack of historical data to study city dynamics over time and space. To address this issue, we analyze scaling between city infrastructure and population across 857 metropolitan areas in the conterminous United States over an unprecedented 115 years (1900–2015) using dasymetrically refined historical population estimates, historical urban road network models, and multi-temporal settlement data to define dynamic city boundaries. We demonstrate that urban scaling exponents closely match theoretical models over a century. Despite some close quantitative agreement with theory, the empirical scaling relations unexpectedly vary across regions. Our …

Date

January 1, 1970

Authors

Keith Burghardt, Johannes H Uhl, Kristina Lerman, Stefan Leyk

Journal

Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science

Volume

51

Issue

9

Pages

2249-2263

Publisher

SAGE Publications