Hyperuniform organization in human settlements

TL;DR

This paper reveals that human settlements exhibit hyperuniform spatial patterns, similar to physical and biological systems, and introduces a growth model explaining their evolution towards such organization.

Contribution

It is the first to identify hyperuniformity in socio-economic systems and develops a growth model that explains how settlements evolve into this pattern.

Findings

Human settlements display hyperuniform spatial organization.

The proposed model predicts settlement distribution and population patterns.

Empirical data supports the model's predictions.

Abstract

Quantifying the spatial organization of human settlements is fundamental to understanding the complexity of urban systems. However, the quantitative patterns of the distribution of villages, towns, and cities that lie between random and regular, are still largely unknown. Here, by analyzing the geographic location of settlements in diverse regions, we show that the apparently complex urban systems can be characterized by disordered hyperuniformity (with small density fluctuations), an intriguing pattern that has been identified in many physical and biological systems, but has rarely been documented in socio-economic systems. By introducing the mechanisms of spatial matching and competition, we develop a growth model that shows how settlements evolve towards hyperuniformity. Our model also predicts the heavy-tail population distribution across settlements, in agreement with empirical observations. These results provide insights into the self-organization of cities, and reveal the universality of spatial organization shared by social, physical, and biological systems.