The scaling of human interactions with city size
Markus Schläpfer,Luís M. A. Bettencourt,Sebastian Grauwin,Mathias Raschke,Rob Claxton,Zbigniew Smoreda,Geoffrey B. West,Carlo Ratti +7 more
TLDR
In this paper, the authors show that both the total number of contacts and the total communication activity grow superlinearly with city population size, according to well-defined scaling relations and resulting from a multiplicative increase that affects most citizens.Abstract:
The size of cities is known to play a fundamental role in social and economic life. Yet, its relation to the structure of the underlying network of human interactions has not been investigated empirically in detail. In this paper, we map society-wide communication networks to the urban areas of two European countries. We show that both the total number of contacts and the total communication activity grow superlinearly with city population size, according to well-defined scaling relations and resulting from a multiplicative increase that affects most citizens. Perhaps surprisingly, however, the probability that an individual's contacts are also connected with each other remains largely unaffected. These empirical results predict a systematic and scale-invariant acceleration of interaction-based spreading phenomena as cities get bigger, which is numerically confirmed by applying epidemiological models to the studied networks. Our findings should provide a microscopic basis towards understanding the superlinear increase of different socioeconomic quantities with city size, that applies to almost all urban systems and includes, for instance, the creation of new inventions or the prevalence of certain contagious diseases.read more
Citations
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Dynamic population mapping using mobile phone data
Pierre Deville,Catherine Linard,Samuel Martin,Marius Gilbert,Forrest R. Stevens,Andrea E. Gaughan,Vincent D. Blondel,Andrew J. Tatem +7 more
TL;DR: This study demonstrates how data collected by mobile phone network operators can cost-effectively provide accurate and detailed maps of population distribution over national scales and any time period while guaranteeing phone users’ privacy.
Journal ArticleDOI
A survey of results on mobile phone datasets analysis
TL;DR: In this article, the authors survey the contributions made so far on the social networks that can be constructed with such data, the study of personal mobility, geographical partitioning, urban planning, and help towards development as well as security and privacy issues.
Journal ArticleDOI
A multi-source dataset of urban life in the city of Milan and the Province of Trentino
Gianni Barlacchi,Marco De Nadai,Roberto Larcher,Antonio Casella,Cristiana Chitic,Giovanni Torrisi,Fabrizio Antonelli,Alessandro Vespignani,Alex Pentland,Bruno Lepri +9 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors describe the richest open multi-source dataset ever released on two geographical areas composed of telecommunications, weather, news, social networks and electricity data from the city of Milan and the Province of Trentino, which is an ideal testbed for methodologies and approaches aimed at tackling a wide range of problems including energy consumption, mobility planning, tourist and migrant flows, urban structures and interactions, event detection, urban well-being and many others.
A multi-source dataset of urban life in the city of Milan and the Province of Trentino
Gianni Barlacchi,Marco De Nadai,Roberto Larcher,Antonio Casella,Cristiana Chitic,Giovanni Torrisi,Fabrizio Antonelli,Alessandro Vespignani,Alex Pentland,Bruno Lepri +9 more
TL;DR: The dataset is composed of telecommunications, weather, news, social networks and electricity data from the city of Milan and the Province of Trentino and makes it an ideal testbed for methodologies and approaches aimed at tackling a wide range of problems.
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