@article {961946,
	title = {Explaining the prevalence, scaling and variance of urban phenomena},
	journal = {Nature Human Behavior},
	year = {2016},
	month = {Dec 2016},
	abstract = {The prevalence of many urban phenomena changes systematically with population size 1 . We propose a theory that unifies models of economic complexity 2,3  and cultural evolution 4  to derive urban scaling. The theory accounts for the difference in scaling exponents and average prevalence across phenomena, as well as the difference in the variance within phenomena across cities of similar size. The central ideas are that a number of necessary complementary factors must be simultaneously present for a phenomenon to occur, and that the diversity of factors is logarithmically related to population size. The model reveals that phenomena that require more factors will be less prevalent, scale more superlinearly and show larger variance across cities of similar size. The theory applies to data on education, employment, innovation, disease and crime, and it entails the ability to predict the prevalence of a phenomenon across cities, given information about the prevalence in a single city.Related Content: The Urban Theory of EverythingHarvard Magazine: Recipes for Thriving Cities},
	url = {http://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-016-0012},
	author = {Andres Gomez-Lievano and Oscar Patterson-Lomba and Hausmann, Ricardo}
}
