The City: Matter, Energy and Information Scaling laws and transport in current urban planning

摘要

In general, it is difficult to analyse the interrelations and complexity of cities to obtain indications of how to improve energy saving, reduce environmental impact, and improve living conditions. Carefully designed decisions can produce unexpected results, due to specific conditions or complex sets of reactions among residents and socioeconomic and political factors. Complexity tends to increase when services are concentrated in large urban areas, and transport needs become critical. However, it has been known for long time that scaling laws, such as Zipf's law, can be applied to cities. Recently, relationships have been found between the mass of a city and its energy consumption. In this work, we explore some scaling relationships between the modern city and transport infrastructures. We found certain similarities to the scaling laws that apply to living organisms. These similarities are considered valid, as both systems are conditioned by problems in transporting mass, energy and information to the many elements that must be supplied. Finally, some preliminary conclusions are drawn about these approximate relationships.