Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
hierarchy
proximity
intercity mobility
city systems
urban relational processes
Intercity mobility reveals the hyperbolic geometry of city systems
🤖 AI Summary
How hierarchy and proximity jointly shape intercity interaction structures in urban systems remains unclear. This study addresses this gap by embedding intercity mobility data into hyperbolic geometric space, proposing a unified geometric model that integrates both hierarchical organization and spatial proximity. The model reveals the non-stationary nestedness and spatial extent of urban hinterlands, governed by the trade-off between these two principles. Validated across twelve national-scale mobility datasets using hyperbolic embedding, complex network modeling, and large-scale empirical data from multiple countries, the framework demonstrates robust performance and offers a novel theoretical foundation for urban science, spatial planning, and regional policy design.
📝 Abstract
The hierarchy and proximity are key dimensions of urban relational processes, but their interplay in shaping intercity interactions and the underlying structures of city systems remain unclear. We develop a novel geometric model of city systems embedding intercity mobility into a latent hyperbolic geometry, which unravels the measures of hierarchy and proximity accounting for their interplay. It is successfully validated against 12 different nationwide intercity mobility datasets. We find a bottom-up emergence of city hierarchies, along which the variations of city-hinterland relations are non-stationary in terms of their nesting and range properties. Such non-stationarity originates from trade-offs between city hierarchy and hinterland range in determining the formation of city-hinterland structures. Hierarchy- and proximity-dominated urban processes can be elucidated from examining dynamics of the trade-offs. The revealed urban relational processes of city systems are at the core of the emerging science of cities and crucial for spatial planning and regional policymaking.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
hyperbolic geometry
intercity mobility
urban hierarchy
city-hinterland relations
non-stationarity
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