Batty Michael
Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London, 1-19 Torrington Place, London WC1E 6BT, UK.
Science. 2008 Feb 8;319(5864):769-71. doi: 10.1126/science.1151419.
Despite a century of effort, our understanding of how cities evolve is still woefully inadequate. Recent research, however, suggests that cities are complex systems that mainly grow from the bottom up, their size and shape following well-defined scaling laws that result from intense competition for space. An integrated theory of how cities evolve, linking urban economics and transportation behavior to developments in network science, allometric growth, and fractal geometry, is being slowly developed. This science provides new insights into the resource limits facing cities in terms of the meaning of density, compactness, and sprawl, and related questions of sustainability. It has the potential to enrich current approaches to city planning and replace traditional top-down strategies with realistic city plans that benefit all city dwellers.
尽管经过了一个世纪的努力，我们对城市如何发展演变的理解仍然极其不足。然而，最近的研究表明，城市是复杂的系统，主要是自下而上发展起来的，其规模和形态遵循明确的缩放定律，这些定律源于对空间的激烈竞争。一种将城市经济学、交通行为与网络科学、异速生长和分形几何的发展联系起来的城市发展综合理论正在慢慢形成。这门科学从密度、紧凑性和扩张的意义以及相关的可持续性问题等方面，为城市面临的资源限制提供了新的见解。它有可能丰富当前的城市规划方法，并用惠及所有城市居民的切实可行的城市规划取代传统的自上而下的策略。
