The Scale-Dependent Behaviour of Cities: A Cross-Cities Multiscale Driver Analysis of Urban Energy Use

Yves Bettignies, Joao Meirelles, Gabriela Fernandez, Franziska Meinherz, Paul Hoekman, Philippe Bouillard and Aristide Athanassiadis
Additional contact information
Yves Bettignies: Building, Architecture and Town Planning Department (BATir), École Polytechnique de Bruxelles, Université libre de Bruxelles, 1050 Brussels, Belgium
Joao Meirelles: Metabolism of Cities ( metabolismofcities.org ), 43 rue de Locht, 1030 Brussels, Belgium
Gabriela Fernandez: Metabolism of Cities ( metabolismofcities.org ), 43 rue de Locht, 1030 Brussels, Belgium
Franziska Meinherz: Laboratory for Human-Environment Relations in Urban System (HERUS), École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
Paul Hoekman: Metabolism of Cities ( metabolismofcities.org ), 43 rue de Locht, 1030 Brussels, Belgium
Philippe Bouillard: Building, Architecture and Town Planning Department (BATir), École Polytechnique de Bruxelles, Université libre de Bruxelles, 1050 Brussels, Belgium
Aristide Athanassiadis: Building, Architecture and Town Planning Department (BATir), École Polytechnique de Bruxelles, Université libre de Bruxelles, 1050 Brussels, Belgium

Sustainability, 2019, vol. 11, issue 12, 1-20

Abstract: Hosting more than half of the world population, cities are currently responsible for two thirds of the global energy use and three quarters of the global CO2 emissions related to energy use. As humanity becomes more urbanized, urban systems are becoming a major nexus of global sustainability. Various studies have tried to pinpoint urban energy use drivers in order to find actionable levers to mitigate consumption and its associated environmental effects. Some of the approaches, mainly coming from complexity science and industrial ecology disciplines, use city-scale data to find power-laws relating to different types of energy use metrics with urban features at a city-scale. By doing so, cities’ internal complexity and heterogeneity are not explicitly addressed. Moreover, to our knowledge, no studies have yet explicitly addressed the potential scale dependency of such drivers. Drivers might not be transferable to other scales and yield undesired effects. In the present study, power-law relations are examined for 10 cities worldwide at city scale and infra-city scale, and the results are compared across scales. Relations are made across three urban features for three energy use intensity metrics. The results show that energy use drivers are in fact scale-dependent and are city-dependent for intra-urban territories.

Keywords: urban energy drivers; urban metabolism; urban scaling; scaling; energy; power-law; multiscale analysis; cross-city analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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