Future Cities May Grow Like Fractals

The United Nations projects a global population of over 12 billion by 2100, and the year 2015 marks an astounding transition in the age demographic of the population. Where will people live, and how will urban cities grow? According to the Sante Fe Institute, future cities should grow just like other distributed natural systems like the branches of rivers and the vasculature of leaves or humans. They should branch like fractals into smaller and smaller roads to connect greater populations over larger and larger areas.
The Sante Fe Institute published a study in 2013 titled City Population Dynamics and Fractal Networks. The paper evaluates urban road networks in terms of fractal geometry to better understand transportation efficiency for the scale up of cities as populations continue to grow. Instead of focusing on road length and other statistics, the branching hierarchies and fractal dimensions of transportation infrastructure were evaluated. Key Information:
Conclusions:
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