A planet of cities: understanding urbanization and socioeconomic development on a global scale

Presented by Luis M. A. Bettencourt 

The world's population is undergoing rapid demographic change, characterized by fast urbanization, population growth and socioeconomic development. 
For the first time in history we can gain a global quantitative view of these processes. This is primarily due to improved standards in collecting demographic and socioeconomic data 
and to the explosive growth of technologies to map them spatially and temporally, which are now available to all interested.  
New opportunities to reveal principles of human social and dynamical organization and dynamics are made possible  by this change as well as to inform public policy regarding development, infrastructural management and public health and safety
 
This talk will be dedicated to the study of urban systems in space and time. We will show that new data from many nations worldwide are revealing the consequences of population 
aggregation in cities, which we characterize quantitatively. We then show how these effects imply a close relationship of urban metrics to non-trivial self-similar function of population size, and how these effects can be factored out to create new spatial maps of urban success and failure. In this way we an also study the evolution of city indicators of wealth creation, invention, crime, health, etc as a function of the local attributes of cities, which are in some cases (e.g. crime) being mapped down to individual instance locations.
 
Finally we speculate how we expect the convergence of geo-referenced data, temporal information and principles of aggregation and differential selection proposed in economics and the social sciences to yield new scientific and predictive perspectives or human and social organization and changePresented by .