The DOI matches its Crossref record; 64 of the 64 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The scaling of human interactions with city size
Open accessAbstract
The size of cities is known to play a fundamental role in social and economic life. Yet, its relation to the structure of the underlying network of human interactions has not been investigated empirically in detail. In this paper, we map society-wide communication networks to the urban areas of two European countries. We show that both the total number of contacts and the total communication activity grow superlinearly with city population size, according to well-defined scaling relations and resulting from a multiplicative increase that affects most citizens. Perhaps surprisingly, however, the probability that an individual's contacts are also connected with each other remains largely unaffected. These empirical results predict a systematic and scale-invariant acceleration of interaction-based spreading phenomena as cities get bigger, which is numerically confirmed by applying epidemiological models to the studied networks. Our findings should provide a microscopic basis towards understanding the superlinear increase of different socioeconomic quantities with city size, that applies to almost all urban systems and includes, for instance, the creation of new inventions or the prevalence of certain contagious diseases.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks
Watts, D. J., & Strogatz, S. H. (1998) · Nature · doi:10.1038/30918 · Cited by 43,060
Granovetter, M. S. (1973) · American Journal of Sociology · doi:10.1086/225469 · Cited by 40,491
Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks
McPherson, M., Smith-Lovin, L., & Cook, J. M. (2001) · Annual Review of Sociology · doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.27.1.415 · Cited by 18,567
Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications
Wasserman, S. S., & Faust, K. (1994) · Cited by 18,005
Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications
Wasserman, S., & Faust, K. (1994) · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511815478 · Cited by 17,557
Complex networks: structure and dynamics
BOCCALETTI, S., LATORA, V, MORENO, Y., CHAVEZ, M., & HWANG, D. (2006) · Physics Reports · doi:10.1016/j.physrep.2005.10.009 · Cited by 11,010
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Row, A. T., & Jacobs, J. M. (1962) · The Yale Law Journal · doi:10.2307/794509 · Cited by 9,085
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Jacobs, J. (2015) · Wiley eBooks · doi:10.1002/9781119084679.ch4 · Cited by 8,053
Infectious Diseases of Humans: Dynamics and Control
(1992) · Annals of Internal Medicine · doi:10.7326/0003-4819-117-2-174_4 · Cited by 7,819
Infectious Diseases of Humans: Dynamics and Control
Anderson, R. M., & May, R. M. (1991) · doi:10.1093/oso/9780198545996.001.0001 · Cited by 6,179
Cited by
Sorted by citations
The Origins of Scaling in Cities
Bettencourt, L. M. A. (2013) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1235823 · Cited by 1,529
Self-citationDynamic population mapping using mobile phone data
Deville, P., Linard, C., Martin, S., Gilbert, M., Stevens, F. R., Gaughan, A. E., Blondel, V. D., & Tatem, A. J. (2014) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.1408439111 · Cited by 893
A survey of results on mobile phone datasets analysis
Blondel, V. D., Decuyper, A., & Krings, G. (2015) · EPJ Data Science · doi:10.1140/epjds/s13688-015-0046-0 · Cited by 679
A multi-source dataset of urban life in the city of Milan and the Province of Trentino
Barlacchi, G., Nadai, M. D., Larcher, R., Casella, A., Chitic, C., Torrisi, G., Antonelli, F., Vespignani, A., Pentland, A., & Lepri, B. (2015) · Scientific Data · doi:10.1038/sdata.2015.55 · Cited by 583
Sarker, I. H. (2021) · SN Computer Science · doi:10.1007/s42979-021-00765-8 · Cited by 570
Metadata
- Authors
- Schläpfer, M., Bettencourt, L. M. A., Grauwin, S., Raschke, M., Claxton, R., Smoreda, Z., West, G. B., & Ratti, C.
- Affiliations
- Santa Fe Institute (US)
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)
- Raschke Software Engineering, 65195 Wiesbaden, Germany
- BT Group (United Kingdom) (GB)
- Orange (France) (FR)
- Corresponding author
- Schläpfer, Markus
- ORCID
- Venue
- Journal of The Royal Society Interface
- Publisher
- The Royal Society
- Published
- 2014-09-06
- Volume
- 11
- Issue
- 98
- Pages
- 20130789-20130789
- ISSN
- 1742-5662 (ISSN-L)
- 1742-5689
- PMC
- PMC4233681
- OpenAlex
- W2099610463
- Cited by
- 356
- References
- 60
- Citations by year
- 2026: 20 · 2025: 21 · 2024: 23 · 2023: 20 · 2022: 28 · 2021: 37 · 2020: 64 · 2019: 30 · 2018: 25 · 2017: 22 · 2016: 26 · 2015: 24 · 2014: 14
- FWCI
- 18.89
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Journal of The Royal Society Interface (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation
- Rockefeller Foundation
- James S. McDonnell Foundation (220020195)
- John Templeton Foundation (15705)
- Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria
- Army Research Office (W911NF1210097)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Statistical and Nonlinear Physics › Complex Network Analysis Techniques
- Social Sciences › Urban Studies › Global Urban Networks and Dynamics
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Agglomeration and Urban Systems
- Keywords
- city size, superlinear scaling, communication networks, urban population, contact networks, scale invariance, epidemic spread, disease transmission
- MeSH terms
- Cities, Communication, United Kingdom, Humans, Population Density, Portugal, Social Behavior, Socioeconomic Factors, Urban Population, Urbanization, Models, Statistical, Cell Phone
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
