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Towards A Theoretical Model of Urban Growth

2009

The overwhelming trend is for urban areas to grow. The challenge is to accentuate the positive impacts of this growth (innovation, art, wealth, etc) while mitigating the negative burdens (crime, pollution, poverty, loss of biodiversity, etc). However, this challenge is complicated by the interconnected physical, biological and social issues. There are several studies on just one aspect of this problem, but we propose a more encompassing approach by looking at the interplay between institutions and ecological processes (topography, economics, etc) using both computational and analytical (mathematical equations) approaches. We used simplified equations to build an intuition towards a more comprehensive modeling framework.

ECOSYSTEM TRANSITION OF THE CITY An Impossible option

According to the UN-Habitat 2020 Population Data Booklet, the world population living in the existing 1934 large metropolises is 2.6 billion people: one-third of the world's population. By the year 2050 will be 66% of the world population living in cities. Urban agglomerations today occupy 7.6% of land mass of the planet. Data that obliges us to continue with an in-depth and critical review of the advent of contemporary cities whose growth pattern is unsustainable: the current development of cities occurs in a dynamic independent of geographical contiguity, ignoring codes coming from land, water, atmosphere and from the vegetal ecosystems. Aspect that is potentiated by the advancement of the communications technology that creates a strong impact on the urban transformations that seems dispense the "obstacle" space according to the apparent needs of "liquid society". The Nature and City have lost their binding force of deep symbolic synthesis due to the explosion of the "symbolic" force of the metropolises that is transformed into predatory, anonymous, uncontrollable forces, with obvious disastrous sequences for the balance of the world. Today is imperative to stop and look carefully at the real interrelationships that the coexistence of natural and built elements suppose in the midst of the chaotic situation of contemporary cities where the ecosystem transition, like a possible future, looks for the moment really impossible.

The unsustainable city. Urban entropy and social capital: the needing of a new urban planning

Procedia Engineering, 2011

The attention to sustainable urban development, participated urban planning, the consideration of territory as non renewable resource, sustainable mobility and so on has been characterizing also the investigation in the field of urban and regional sciences. Moving from these assumptions the paper seeks to codify a new process of sustainable town planing which is able to indicate the real actions to operate on the city. This paper intends to describe this new process called: Ecotownplanning starting from the systemic approach to the city. The paper is divided into three parts. The first part aims to build the background by placing the contribution inside the debate on global change, in particular as regards the issue of entropy. Tthe second part points out that one of the strategic factors to trigger the change may be to rebuild the social capital within cities. Finally, concrete actions are proposed for urban planning (Ecotownplanning) that can help recover the operational condition of sustainable urban development.

Urbanization as a Transformative force

2018

— Growth is a general phenomenon of any biological system. A settlement's growth can either be a planned or a biological process. With cities in today's context, whose power lies in financial ability, aim at economic growth which results a change in demographic distribution across its region. A rapid urbanization indicates a country's economy in its developing stage towards a modernized and a matured one, with a regulating plan for urbanization avoids imbalanced distribution of man power and uneven development across the country. The study aims at identifying the need for regulated urbanization for balanced growth, which acts as a catalyst for nation's development with supporting cases across the world.

The Link between Urbanization and Economic Growth

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2022

Urbanization has been increasing day by day with the aim of benefitting the economy through urban agglomeration. Therefore, this study focuses on the link between urbanization and economic development in the world. Urbanization and economic development are studied in this paper with respect to agglomeration theory and CO 2 emission. All the continents are studied with respect to these two approaches to develop a better understanding of the topic. This paper has explored the link between urbanization and economic development in each continent of the world with the help of the best examples of that region. The results of the study are (1) during the initial phase of urbanization it greatly promotes economic growth, (2) in its later phases there is impact but not as much accelerated as in the initial phase, (3) in every scenario CO 2 emission is the result of urbanization because of the increased consumption of energy of fossil fuels polluting the environment, (4) urban agglomeration will only benefit if it is planned and financed properly otherwise, the result will be only urban slums and shanty, and (5) in the later phases of urbanization leaders' are focused towards the harmful effects of CO2 emissions and minimizing them through achieving sustainability. These findings show the complex relationship between urbanization and economic growth that is affected by many other factors.

Urban entropy vs sustainability: a new town planning perspective

The Sustainable City VII, 2012

The city, interpreted as a complex dynamic system, is experiencing ungovernable levels of entropic growth related to locally-based human activities. Indeed, the main antagonist of urban sustainability is anthropogenic entropy. The general crisis is due to the production of entropy within single urban subsystems, which is transmitted, with a ripple effect, to all the others and to the entire city. Due to endogenous malfunctioning in its parts or in its structure, a subsystem can be viewed as an "entropic generator" and can trigger a chain of damage that can lead to the collapse of the entire urban system. The urban crisis can thus be linked to the entropy produced, especially within the human subsystem. In order to start appropriate processes that gear the structure of the urban system towards sustainability measures, it is first necessary to reduce urban entropy. New procedures are being developed to plan sustainable cities which, in a cyclical process, are also rooted in social capital. Entropy can be distinguished in directaction, expressed as soil use (how, where, for how long) and entropy-induced action which is carried out by the activities producing air, electromagnetic noise, water pollution. This paper, also starting from the studies developed by E. Tiezzi and the paper by F. Muller (presented at "Sustainable city 2010" in La Coruňa), seeks to identify the characteristics of anthropogenic entropy in order to propose the adoption of a new "urban ethic" which has to become one of the determinants of eco-town planning.

Urban development and global sustainability

E3S Web of Conferences, 2014

In the 1950s, the economist Simon Kuznets theorized the existence of a bellshaped curve describing the correlation between the level of GDP per capita and income inequality. This generated another hypothesis concerning the existence of an inverted-U relationship between income per capita (GDP) and environmental impact. By means of a crosscountry analysis, the article shows that, at least at the global scale, an Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) does not exist, but rather an Environmental Urban Curve (EUC). The city exhibits an complex socioeconomic metabolism that we can define in terms of dissipative and resilience territorial structures. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.