Scaling Properties of Urban Facilities

TL;DR

This paper investigates the universal scaling laws governing the spatial distribution of urban facilities across Chinese cities, revealing power-law invariance and proposing a stochastic model that outperforms previous models.

Contribution

It introduces a double stochastic process model that captures the universal power-law scaling of urban facility distributions across multiple cities and facility types.

Findings

Spatial distributions follow power-law scaling invariance.

Exponents are consistent across different cities and facility types.

The proposed DSP model better fits empirical data than previous models.

Abstract

Two measurements are employed to quantitatively investigate the scaling properties of the spatial distribution of urban facilities, the K function by number counting and the variance-mean relationship with the method of expanding bins. The K function and the variance-mean relationship are both power functions. It means that the spatial distribution of urban facilities are scaling invariant. Further analysis of more data (which includes 8 types of facilities in 37 major Chinese cities) shows that the exponents of the power function do not have systematic variations across facilities and cities, which suggests the possibility that the scaling rule is universal. A double stochastic process (DSP) model is proposed such that the two empirical results can both be embedded. Simulation of DSP yields better agreement with the urban data than of the correlated percolation model.