The world's cities are absorbing one million
additional people every week—and by 2030, they could consume an extra
1.5 million square kilometers of land, or roughly the area of France,
Germany and Spain combined. What would be the best ways for those cities
to grow? A new study examines how—before urban planners existed—a group
of Italian villages evolved into suburbs outside Milan today. Such
studies may eventually help planners optimize future developments.
"We know few things about how cities grow naturally," says Emanuele Strano, a doctoral candidate studying urban geography
at Switzerland's École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne who authored
the study. "Urban planners believe that with regulations we can control
the growth of cities. The question is, how can we control a thing if we
don't really know how it behaves?"
The new study takes a step toward that essential understanding. Strano
and his colleagues—a group of computer scientists, mathematicians,
physicists and urban scholars—teamed up to provide the first
quantitative analysis of how unplanned street networks evolve over time.
more about street networks:
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