Discrete Dynamics in Nature and Society
Volume 3 (1999), Issue 2-3, Pages 109-124
doi:10.1155/S1026022699000151
Self-organized criticality and urban development
1Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London, 1-19 Torrington Place, London WC1E 6BT, UK
2Department of Geography and Geology, Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti 48197, MI, USA
Received 16 November 1998
Copyright © 1999 Michael Batty and Yichun Xie. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
Urban society is undergoing as profound a spatial transformation as that associated with the emergence of the industrial city two centuries ago. To describe and measure this transition, we introduce a new theory based on the concept that large-scale, complex systems composed
of many interacting elements, show a surprising degree of resilience to change, holding themselves at critical levels for long periods until conditions emerge which move the system, often abruptly, to a new threshold. This theory is called ‘self-organized criticality’; it is consistent with systems in which global patterns emerge from local action which is the hallmark of self-organization, and it is consistent with developments in system dynamics and their morphology which find expression in fractal geometry and weak chaos theory. We illustrate the theory using a unique space–time series of urban development for Buffalo,
Western New York, which contains the locations of over one quarter of a million sites coded by their year of construction and dating back to 1773, some 60 years before the city began to develop. We measure the emergence and growth of the city using urban density functions from which measures of fractal dimension are used to construct growth paths of the way the city has grown to fill its region. These phase portraits suggest the existence of transitions
between the frontier, the settled agricultural region, the centralized industrial city and the decentralized postindustrial city, and our analysis reveals that Buffalo has maintained itself at a critical threshold since the emergence of the automobile city some 70 years ago. Our implied speculation is: how long will this kind of urban form be maintained in the face of seemingly unstoppable technological change?