Sep 13, 2019 | 15:00—16:00
Urban scaling laws characterise non-linear and linear behaviours that occur in the context of a city. They relate population size to a large number of variables and are fundamental to achieve a comprehensive explanation of the urban environment. This talk presents an explanation for the appearance of these non-linear behaviours that emerge from the fractal geometry of a city. A scaling law in this framework has an exponent that naturally arises from the proportion between the fractal dimension of the road infrastructure and the fractal dimension of the population. This perspective allows us to predict a number of other scaling laws such as the average number of levels in a city and furthermore it shows that at a critical population, cities change from a horizontal expansion and densification to a three-dimensional growth.
Many driven dissipative systems can be characterized thermodynamically as being non-ergodic and violating detailed balance. Recently Sample Space Reducing Processes (SSRPs) were introduced as a potential method to understand the statistics emerging from such systems. The famous Oslo Sand Pile Model is studied, which was originally introduced to describe the dynamics of driven piles of granular matter. Such models are usually conceived within the framework of Self Organized Criticality (SOC), as they show powerlaw statistics in their avalanche size distributions. We ask the question, whether these statistics can also be deduced from an underlying SSRP.
Simon Rella is a student of Physics and currently working on his Master Thesis at the CSH Vienna. His research interests include self organized systems and social insects. He holds a bachelor’s degree in physics and astrophysics from the University of Vienna.