Co-creating the future: participatory cities and digital governance.

The digital revolution, fuelled by advancements in social media, Big Data, the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence, is reshaping our urban landscapes into 'participatory cities'. These cities leverage digital technologies to foster citizen engagement, collaborative decision-making and community-driven urban development, thus unlocking new potentials while confronting emerging threats. Such technologies are empowering individuals and organizations in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago.

Identification and measurement of intensive economic growth in a Roman imperial province.

A key question in economic history is the degree to which preindustrial economies could generate sustained increases in per capita productivity. Previous studies suggest that, in many preindustrial contexts, growth was primarily a consequence of agglomeration. Here, we examine evidence for three different socioeconomic rates that are available from the archaeological record for Roman Britain.

Information synergy maximizes the growth rate of heterogeneous groups.

Collective action and group formation are fundamental behaviors among both organisms cooperating to maximize their fitness and people forming socioeconomic organizations. Researchers have extensively explored social interaction structures via game theory and homophilic linkages, such as kin selection and scalar stress, to understand emergent cooperation in complex systems. However, we still lack a general theory capable of predicting how agents benefit from heterogeneous preferences, joint information, or skill complementarities in statistical environments.

Implicit racial biases are lower in more populous more diverse and less segregated US cities.

Implicit biases - differential attitudes towards members of distinct groups - are pervasive in human societies and create inequities across many aspects of life. Recent research has revealed that implicit biases are generally driven by social contexts, but not whether they are systematically influenced by the ways that humans self-organize in cities. We leverage complex system modeling in the framework of urban scaling theory to predict differences in these biases between cities.

Evidence of COVID-19 fatalities in Swedish neighborhoods from a full population study.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted a debate about whether marginalized communities suffered the disproportionate brunt of the pandemic's mortality. Empirical studies addressing this question typically suffer from statistical uncertainties and potential biases associated with uneven and incomplete reporting. We use geo-coded micro-level data for the entire population of Sweden to analyze how local neighborhood characteristics affect the likelihood of dying with COVID-19 at individual level, given the individual's overall risk of death.

Integration of urban science and urban climate adaptation research: opportunities to advance climate action.

There is a growing recognition that responding to climate change necessitates urban adaptation. We sketch a transdisciplinary research effort, arguing that actionable research on urban adaptation needs to recognize the nature of cities as social networks embedded in physical space. Given the pace, scale and socioeconomic outcomes of urbanization in the Global South, the specificities and history of its cities must be central to the study of how well-known agglomeration effects can facilitate adaptation.

Learning increases growth and reduces inequality in shared noisy environments.

Stochastic multiplicative dynamics characterize many complex natural phenomena such as selection and mutation in evolving populations, and the generation and distribution of wealth within social systems. Population heterogeneity in stochastic growth rates has been shown to be the critical driver of wealth inequality over long time scales. However, we still lack a general statistical theory that systematically explains the origins of these heterogeneities resulting from the dynamical adaptation of agents to their environment.

Digital Microfluidics-Powered Real-Time Monitoring of Isothermal DNA Amplification of Cancer Biomarker.

We introduce a digital microfluidics (DMF) platform specifically designed to perform a loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) of DNA and applied it to a real-time amplification to monitor a cancer biomarker, (associated to 40% of all human tumors), using fluorescence microscopy. We demonstrate the full manipulation of the sample and reagents on the DMF platform, resulting in the successful amplification of 90 pg of the target DNA (0.5 ng/µL) in less than one hour.

Evidence and theory for lower rates of depression in larger US urban areas.

It is commonly assumed that cities are detrimental to mental health. However, the evidence remains inconsistent and at most, makes the case for differences between rural and urban environments as a whole. Here, we propose a model of depression driven by an individual's accumulated experience mediated by social networks.

Creatures of the state? Metropolitan counties compensated for state inaction in initial U.S. response to COVID-19 pandemic.

Societal responses to crises require coordination at multiple levels of organization. Exploring early efforts to contain COVID-19 in the U.S.

Tobacco and marijuana use and their association with serum prostate-specific antigen levels among African American men in Chicago.

African American (AA) men experience more than twice the prostate cancer mortality as White men yet are under-represented in academic research involving prostate-specific antigen (PSA), a biomarker of prostate cancer aggressiveness. We examined the impact of self-reported tobacco (cigarette pack-years and current tobacco use including e-cigarettes) and current regular marijuana use on serum PSA level based on clinical laboratory testing among 928 AA men interviewed 2013-2018 in Chicago. We defined outcome of elevated PSA ≥ 4.

Demography and the emergence of universal patterns in urban systems.

Urban areas exist in a wide variety of population sizes, from small towns to huge megacities. No proposed form for the statistical distribution of city sizes has received more attention than Zipf's law, a Pareto distribution with power law exponent equal to one. However, this distribution is typically violated by empirical evidence for small and large cities.

Urban growth and the emergent statistics of cities.

Urban theory models cities as spatial equilibria to derive their aggregate properties as functions of extensive variables, such as population size. However, this assumption seems at odds with cities' most interesting properties as engines of fast and variable processes of growth and change. Here, we build a general statistical dynamics of cities across scales, from single agents to entire urban systems.

ChicagO Multiethnic Prevention and Surveillance Study (COMPASS): Increased Response Rates Among African American Residents in Low Socioeconomic Status Neighborhoods.

African American (AA) populations experience persistent health disparities in the USA. Low representation in bio-specimen research precludes stratified analyses and creates challenges in studying health outcomes among AA populations. Previous studies examining determinants of bio-specimen research participation among minority participants have focused on individual-level barriers and facilitators.

Growth and development in prefecture-level cities in China.

Nowhere has the scale and scope of urbanization been larger than in China over the last few decades. We analyze Chinese city development between the years 1996 and 2014 using data for the urbanized components of prefecture-level cities. We show that, despite much variability and fast economic and demographic change, China is undergoing transformations similar to the historical trajectory of other urban systems.

Urban geography and scaling of contemporary Indian cities.

This paper attempts to create a first comprehensive analysis of the integrated characteristics of contemporary Indian cities, using scaling and geographical analysis over a set of diverse indicators. We use data of urban agglomerations in India from the Census 2011 and from a few other sources to characterize patterns of urban population density, infrastructure, urban services, crime and technological innovation. Many of the results are in line with expectations from urban theory and with the behaviour of analogous quantities in other urban systems in both high and middle-income nations.

Toward cities without slums: Topology and the spatial evolution of neighborhoods.

The world is urbanizing quickly with nearly 4 billion people presently living in urban areas, about 1 billion of them in slums. Achieving sustainable development from rapid urbanization relies critically on creating cities without slums. We show that it is possible to diagnose systematically the central physical problem of slums-the lack of spatial accesses and related services-using a topological analysis of neighborhood maps and resolved by finding solutions to a sequence of constrained optimization problems.

Urban occupational structures as information networks: The effect on network density of increasing number of occupations.

Urban economies are composed of diverse activities, embodied in labor occupations, which depend on one another to produce goods and services. Yet little is known about how the nature and intensity of these interdependences change as cities increase in population size and economic complexity. Understanding the relationship between occupational interdependencies and the number of occupations defining an urban economy is relevant because interdependence within a networked system has implications for system resilience and for how easily can the structure of the network be modified.

Heterogeneity and scale of sustainable development in cities.

Rapid worldwide urbanization is at once the main cause and, potentially, the main solution to global sustainable development challenges. The growth of cities is typically associated with increases in socioeconomic productivity, but it also creates strong inequalities. Despite a growing body of evidence characterizing these heterogeneities in developed urban areas, not much is known systematically about their most extreme forms in developing cities and their consequences for sustainability.

An overview of city analytics.

We introduce the 14 articles in the Royal Society Open Science themed issue on City Analytics. To provide a high-level, strategic, overview, we summarize the topics addressed and the analytical tools deployed. We then give a more detailed account of the individual contributions.

Population-Area Relationship for Medieval European Cities.

Medieval European urbanization presents a line of continuity between earlier cities and modern European urban systems. Yet, many of the spatial, political and economic features of medieval European cities were particular to the Middle Ages, and subsequently changed over the Early Modern Period and Industrial Revolution. There is a long tradition of demographic studies estimating the population sizes of medieval European cities, and comparative analyses of these data have shed much light on the long-term evolution of urban systems.