1. A scaling investigation of urban form features in Latin America cities.
- Author
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Paiva ASS, Santos GF, Castro CP, Rodriguez DA, Bilal U, Sousa Filho JF, Freitas A, Montes F, Dronova I, Barreto ML, and Andrade RFS
- Subjects
- Humans, Cities, Latin America epidemiology, Brazil, Urban Population
- Abstract
This paper examines scaling behaviors of urban landscape and street design metrics with respect to city population in Latin America. We used data from the SALURBAL project, which has compiled and harmonized data on health, social, and built environment for 371 Latin American cities above 100,000 inhabitants. These metrics included total urbanized area, effective mesh size, area in km2 and number of streets. We obtained scaling relations by regressing log(metric) on log (city population). The results show an overall sub-linear scaling behavior of most variables, indicating a relatively lower value of each variable in larger cities. We also explored the potential influence of colonization on the current built environment, by analyzing cities colonized by Portuguese (Brazilian cities) or Spaniards (Other cities in Latin America) separately. We found that the scaling behaviors are similar for both sets of cities., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2023 Paiva et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)
- Published
- 2023
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