Space-time correlations in urban sprawl

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 [Bettencourt LMA, Lobo J, Helbing D, Kuehnert C, West GB (2007) Growth,. Innovation, Scaling, and the Pace of Life in Cities, Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 104 (17) 7301-7306] but many fundamental issues still defy comprehension. We present here compelling empirical evidence of a high level of regularity regarding time and spatial correlations in urban sprawl, unraveling patterns about the inertia in the growth of cities and their interaction with each other. By using one of the world's most exhaustive extant demographic data basis ---that of the Spanish Government's Institute INE, with records covering 111 years and (in 2011) 45 million people, distributed amongst more than 8000 population nuclei--- we show that the inertia of city growth has a characteristic time of 15 years, and its interaction with the growth of other cities has a characteristic distance of 70 km. Distance is shown to be the main factor that entangles two cities (a 60% of total correlations). We present a mathematical model for population flows that i) reproduces all these regularities and ii) can be used to predict the population-evolution of cities. The power of our current social theories is thereby enhanced

Density functional theory in the canonical ensemble I General formalism

Density functional theory stems from the Hohenberg-Kohn-Sham-Mermin (HKSM) theorem in the grand canonical ensemble (GCE). However, as recent work shows, although its extension to the canonical ensemble (CE) is not straightforward, work in nanopore systems could certainly benefit from a mesoscopic DFT in the CE. The stumbling block is the fixed $N$ constraint which is responsible for the failure in proving the interchangeability of density profiles and external potentials as independent variables. Here we prove that, if in the CE the correlation functions are stripped off of their asymptotic behaviour (which is not in the form of a properly irreducible $n$-body function), the HKSM theorem can be extended to the CE. In proving that, we generate a new {\it hierarchy} of $N$-modified distribution and correlation functions which have the same formal structure that the more conventional ones have (but with the proper irreducible $n$-body behaviour) and show that, if they are employed, either a modified external field or the density profiles can indistinctly be used as independent variables. We also write down the $N$-modified free energy functional and prove that the thermodynamic potential is minimized by the equilibrium values of the new hierarchy.Comment: 17 pages, IOP style, submitted to J. Phys. Condens. Matte

Scale-invariance underlying the logistic equation and its social applications

On the basis of dynamical principles we derive the Logistic Equation (LE), widely employed (among multiple applications) in the simulation of population growth, and demonstrate that scale-invariance and a mean-value constraint are sufficient and necessary conditions for obtaining it. We also generalize the LE to multi-component systems and show that the above dynamical mechanisms underlie large number of scale-free processes. Examples are presented regarding city-populations, diffusion in complex networks, and popularity of technological products, all of them obeying the multi-component logistic equation in an either stochastic or deterministic way. So as to assess the predictability-power of our present formalism, we advance a prediction, regarding the next 60 months, for the number of users of the three main web browsers (Explorer, Firefox and Chrome) popularly referred as "Browser Wars"

MaxEnt and dynamical information

The MaxEnt solutions are shown to display a variety of behaviors (beyond the traditional and customary exponential one) if adequate dynamical information is inserted into the concomitant entropic-variational principle. In particular, we show both theoretically and numerically that power laws and power laws with exponential cut-offs emerge as equilibrium densities in proportional and other dynamics

Thermodynamics of the Stephani Universes

We examine the consistency of the thermodynamics of the most general class of conformally flat solution with an irrotational perfect fluid source (the Stephani Universes). For the case when the isometry group has dimension $r\ge2$, the Gibbs-Duhem relation is always integrable, but if $r<2$ it is only integrable for the particular subclass (containing FRW cosmologies) characterized by $r=1$ and by admitting a conformal motion parallel to the 4-velocity. We provide explicit forms of the state variables and equations of state linking them. These formal thermodynamic relations are determined up to an arbitrary function of time which reduces to the FRW scale factor in the FRW limit of the solutions. We show that a formal identification of this free parameter with a FRW scale factor determined by FRW dynamics leads to an unphysical temperature evolution law. If this parameter is not identified with a FRW scale factor, it is possible to find examples of solutions and formal equations of state complying with suitable energy conditions and reasonable asymptotic behavior and temperature laws.Comment: 25 pages, Plain.TeX, four figure