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Category: Project

Description: The study analyzes quantitative micro-level data aggregated to the city-level in urban systems in Europe and the United States. The study demonstrates how urban scaling laws arise from within-city inequality. We show that indicators of interconnectivity, productivity, and innovation have heavy tailed distributions in cities, and that city tails, and their growth with city size, play an important role in the emergence of urban scaling. With agent-based simulation and an analysis of longitudinal micro-level data, we identify a city-size dependent cumulative advantage mechanism behind differences in the tailedness of urban indicators by city size. The data and code that support the findings of this study are available for download here. We collected the online networking data for Russia and Ukraine through the VKontakte API (https://vk.com/dev/openapi), the data on US patents are from the US Patent and Trademark Office (https://www.patentsview.org) and on research grants from Dimensions (https://www.dimensions.ai). The code for these data collections is available upon request. The Swedish micro-level data come from administrative and tax records and can therefore not be shared; access may be requested from Statistics Sweden (https://scb.se/en/services/guidance-for-researchers-and-universities). Additional information and data may be requested from the authors.