Diffusive resettlement: irreversible urban transitions in closed systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a non-equilibrium diffusive model for urban resettlement, validated with Australian migration data, predicting long-term city spatial structures based on population group dynamics.

Contribution

It presents a novel phenomenological framework modeling urban migration as an irreversible diffusion process, distinguishing population groups with different relocation behaviors.

Findings

Population consists of two groups with distinct relocation frequencies.

The model accurately predicts the long-term spatial distribution of populations.

Urban resettlement can be effectively described as an irreversible diffusive process.

Abstract

We propose a phenomenological non-equilibrium framework for modelling the evolution of cities which describes the intra-urban resettlement as an irreversible diffusive process. We validate this framework using the actual migration data for the Australian capital cities. With respect to the residential relocation, the population is shown to be composed of two distinct groups, exhibiting different relocation frequencies. In the context of the developed framework, these groups can be interpreted as two components of a binary mixture, each with its own diffusive relaxation time. Using this approach, we obtain long-term predictions of the cities' spatial structure, which defines their equilibrium population distribution.