Physics Colloquium

Abstract:

Cities are some of the most complex systems on Earth. Over the last few decades much more empirical information has become available about many of the facets of cities, including measurements of their physical extent, energy use, infrastructure, population and socioeconomic performance. Coupled to global trends towards urbanization and a greater ability for comparative analysis, this wealth of data is enabling new quantitative theory that describes how cities function and grow.

In this talk, I will give a primer for physicists on the empirical regularities of cities and the status of an emerging quantitative theory of cities and urbanization. I will show how cities exhibit certain kinds of scale-invariant statistics and how these can be predicted from models that treat cities as spatial (dissipative) bound states, where density and interaction rates increase with population. I will also show how growth and development in urban societies is starting to be understood through the convergence of methods from statistical mechanics, information theory and evolutionary mathematics. I will finish with some speculations about an emerging statistical mechanics of complex systems capable of describing selection and learning.