Urban highways cut opportunities for social relationships, says study
Mar 2025, phys.org
Highways were intended to shorten the commute to work and make traveling within the city easier."But this comes at a price, especially over short distances. If someone wants to cross a multi-lane highway, it takes a lot of effort. So highways connect over long distances, but divide over short ones."
via Complexity Science Hub Vienna: Luca Maria Aiello et al, Urban highways are barriers to social ties, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2408937122
Image credit: AI Art - Racetrack Alive - 2025
Urban inequality scaling throughout the ages: Ancient and modern cities show predictable elite wealth patterns
Mar 2025, phys.org
Don't forget the Santa Fe Institute mixup on this topic - about ten years ago they thought population density rises in tandem with wealth, according to scaling laws, but a few years ago that thought was revised to show that only the average rises, but if you break it down, there's less people with more money and more people with less money:
The researchers found that the same scaling relationships that appear to shape modern economic activity—in which cities grow richer and more productive as they get larger—may also shape the way wealth is concentrated at the top. In other words, the processes that make cities wealthy may also often make them unequal."It seems as if inequality isn't a side-effect of city living under particular cultural or economic conditions; it may be a built-in consequence of urban growth itself."Scientists analyzed evidence from both ancient Roman and modern cities to see how wealth scales with city size. The data for Roman cities included numbers of monuments and counts of inscriptions dedicating monuments to elite patrons. Data for modern cities included counts of very tall buildings, as well as counts of billionaires per city. They then applied statistical scaling methods to test for mathematical relationships between city size and indicators of elite wealth.
via Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology: Parallel scaling of elite wealth in ancient Roman and modern cities with implications for understanding urban inequality, Nature Cities (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s44284-025-00213-1
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