Role of Intermittency in Urban Development: A Model of Large-Scale City Formation

Abstract

A stochastic model that incorporates the essential mechanisms supposed to govern city formation is numerically analyzed. The model generates intermittent spatiotemporal structures and predicts a power-law population distribution whose exponent is in excellent agreement with the universal exponent observed in real human demography. Preliminary results of cluster analysis of the model also coincide with actual data. We thus suggest that urban development at large scales could be driven by intermittency processes.