2003/05/31 by Rui Carvalho, Alan Penn · 6 citations
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Engineering · Environmental Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Complex Systems and Time Series Analysis #Land Use and Ecosystem Services #Urban Design and Spatial Analysis #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.physa.2003.10.024
published as Physica A, Volume 332, Pages 539-547 (1 February 2004) · 11 pages, 3 figures; minor changes
arxiv created 2003/09/25 · openalex publication_date 2003/11/06 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We present a broad, phenomenological picture of the distribution of the length of open space linear segments, l, derived from maps of 36 cities in 14 different countries. By scaling the Zipf plot of l, we obtain two master curves for a sample of cities, which are not a function of city size. We show that a third class of cities is not easily classifiable into these two universality classes. The cumulative distribution of l displays power-law tails with two distinct exponents, αB=2 and αR=3. We suggest a link between our data and the possibility of observing and modelling urban geometric structures using Levy processes.