Compendium of Urban Complexity

This book brings together key findings, insights, and theories at the intersection of two disciplines – city science and complex systems. It features a curated collection of chapters contributed by emerging scholars conducting cutting-edge research in complexity science, interdisciplinary physics, and quantitative geography. The compendium is tailored to a thematically diverse audience, spanning quantitative fields such as statistical and mathematical physics, as well as socially-focused domains such as geography and urban planning. By integrating novel methods and insights from physics, economics, and geography, this book aims at an interdisciplinary spectrum of graduate students and academic researchers studying cities as complex systems.

City Size Distributions.- Urban Scaling Laws.- The Bene?ts and Costs of Agglomeration: Insights from Economics and Complexity.- Urban Mobility.- The Long-run Impacts of Migration on the City Population Size Distribution.- The Gravity Model for Social Systems.- Segregation in Cities.- Monocentric or Polycentric City? An Empirical Perspective.- Urban Climate Through the Lens of Complex System Science.- Designing Complexity? The Role of Self-Organization in Urban Planning and Design.- Fractality of Cities.- Entropy and the City: Origins, Trajectories and Explorations of the Concept in Urban Science.- An Introduction to Mathematical Concepts of Power-laws in Cities and Urban Systems.

Diego Rybski is head of the Urban Complexity Group at the Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development (IOER) in Dresden. In addition, he is external faculty at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna and a section editor at PLoS One (Urban Studies). Most recently, he was admitted to the Heisenberg-Program (German Research Foundation, DFG). Diego holds a PhD in Physics from Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen (Germany). He was a visiting scholar at Bar-Ilan University (Israel) and a postdoctoral fellow at the City College of New York (CCNY). Between 2019 and 2021, he was a Feodor Lynen Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on cities and urban systems – specifically, on cities as complex systems, urban sustainability, and urban climate and the urban heat island effect.