Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
Instituto de Física Interdisciplinar y Sistemas Complejos IFISC (CSIC-UIB), Campus UIB, Palma de Mallorca, Spain.
PLoS One. 2022 Aug 17;17(8):e0272863. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0272863. eCollection 2022.
Cities are characterized by the presence of a dense population with a high potential for interactions between individuals of diverse backgrounds. They appear in parallel to the Neolithic revolution a few millennia ago. The advantages brought in terms of agglomeration for economy, innovation, social and cultural advancements have kept them as a major landmark in recent human history. There are many different aspects to study in urban systems from a scientific point of view, one can concentrate in demography and population evolution, mobility, economic output, land use and urban planning, home accessibility and real estate market, energy and water consumption, waste processing, health, education, integration of minorities, just to name a few. In the last decade, the introduction of communication and information technologies have enormously facilitated the collection of datasets on these and other questions, making possible a more quantitative approach to city science. All these topics have been addressed in many works in the literature, and we do not intend to offer here a systematic review. Instead, we will only provide a brief taste of some of these above-mentioned aspects, which could serve as an introduction to the collection 'Cities as Complex Systems'. Such a non-systematic view will lead us to leave outside many relevant papers, and for this we must apologise.
城市的特点是人口密集，具有不同背景的个体之间高度互动的潜力。它们与几千年前的新石器时代革命同时出现。在经济、创新、社会和文化进步方面，城市聚集带来的优势使其成为人类近代历史上的一个主要地标。从科学的角度来看，城市系统有许多不同的方面值得研究，人们可以关注人口统计学和人口演变、流动性、经济产出、土地利用和城市规划、家庭可达性和房地产市场、能源和水消耗、废物处理、健康、教育、少数民族融合等。在过去的十年中，通信和信息技术的引入极大地方便了这些问题和其他问题数据集的收集，使得对城市科学进行更定量的方法成为可能。所有这些主题都在文献中的许多作品中得到了探讨，我们并不打算在这里进行系统的综述。相反，我们将仅简要介绍上述某些方面，作为对“复杂城市系统”文集的介绍。这种非系统的观点将使我们忽略许多相关的论文，对此我们深表歉意。
