A scaling investigation of urban form features in Latin America cities

Aureliano S S Paiva, Gervásio F Santos, Caio P Castro, Daniel A Rodriguez, Usama Bilal, J Firmino de Sousa Filho, Anderson Freitas, Felipe Montes, Iryna Dronova, Maurício L Barreto and Roberto F S Andrade

PLOS ONE, 2023, vol. 18, issue 12, 1-16

Abstract: This paper examines scaling behaviors of urban landscape and street design metrics with respect to city population in Latin America. We used data from the SALURBAL project, which has compiled and harmonized data on health, social, and built environment for 371 Latin American cities above 100,000 inhabitants. These metrics included total urbanized area, effective mesh size, area in km2 and number of streets. We obtained scaling relations by regressing log(metric) on log (city population). The results show an overall sub-linear scaling behavior of most variables, indicating a relatively lower value of each variable in larger cities. We also explored the potential influence of colonization on the current built environment, by analyzing cities colonized by Portuguese (Brazilian cities) or Spaniards (Other cities in Latin America) separately. We found that the scaling behaviors are similar for both sets of cities.

Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0293518 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 93518&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0293518

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0293518

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().