This paper aims to provide a new methodological and empirical contribution to the rising literature on the relative performance and benchmarking of large cities in a competitive world. On the basis of a recent detailed database on many achievement criteria of 35 major cities in the world, it seeks to arrive at a relative performance ranking of these cities by using Data Envelopment Analysis (DE...

Despite the long history of modelling human mobility, we continue to lack a highly accurate approach with low data requirements for predicting mobility patterns in cities. Here, we present a population-weighted opportunities model without any adjustable parameters to capture the underlying driving force accounting for human mobility patterns at the city scale. We use various mobility data colle...

This paper considers the formation of cities in a simple model in which the preferences of agents depend on at most two characteristics of a location: its population and its average distance to the other agents. In such a simple model it is possible to recreate phenomena such as path dependency and centrally located cities which have been generated in more sophisticated models. Moreover, an exa...

Data generated on location-aware social media provide rich information about the places (shopping malls, restaurants, cafés, etc) where citizens spend their time. That information can, in turn, be used to describe city neighborhoods in terms of the activity that takes place therein. For example, the data might reveal that citizens visit one neighborhood mainly for shopping, while another for it...

Re-analyses of a study on distance estimations between German cities [1] revealed that conclusions drawn from aggregated data sets can also be found on the individuals’ data level. It could be shown that mental barriers, here the former iron curtain which has been physically absent for 15 years, while still assuming a significant role in social interactions, are powerful predictors for psycholo...

Population density gradients for South Africa’s cities are quite small in absolute value, indicating a relatively flat population distribution across the cities. In contrast employment is less flatly distributed than the population. The relationship between employment densities and distance across South African cities has remained constant between 1996 and 2001 whilst there has been on average ...

Understanding demographic and migrational patterns constitutes a great challenge. Millions of individual decisions, motivated by economic, political, demographic, rational and/or emotional reasons underlie the high complexity of demographic dynamics. Significant advances in quantitatively understanding such complexity have been registered in recent years, as those involving the growth of cities...

City size distributions are known to be well approximated by power laws across many countries. By far the most popular explanation for such power-law regularities is in terms of random growth processes, where power laws arise asymptotically from the assumption of iid growth rates among all cities within a given country. But this assumption has additional consequences. Since all subsets of citie...