Leyes de escala en los espacios urbanos

Abstract

The interrelations and complexity in the modern urban spaces make difficult to decide on the actions to do to improve living conditions or minimize energy use or reduce environmental impact. Carefully planned decisions might produce unexpected results because of unexpected perturbations, or even because of complex sets of reactions from the residents or economic factors, in a very complex way. Complexity tends to increase with size, in a concomitant way with the concentration of services in cities. The needs of transportation become more evident as the size increases, also in urban agglomerations. It woulb be very desirable to know general rules, or at least tendencies, to have definite guidelines in the decision taking processes referring urban concentrations, but complexity makes this difficult. There are other very complex systems, the living organisms that satisfy approximate relationships between some of their macroscopic magnitudes, known as alometric scaling laws. In general, these laws relate one magnitude as for instance, metabolic dissipation, or heart beating rate, to the size or the mass of the organism. These relationships have been justified as due to the transport phenomena and its optimization. In this work, we explore the applicability of these relations to the modern cities, from the idea that modern cities are very transport-conditioned. The results show a reasonable continuity with the scaling laws that apply in the animal world, a fact that shows the importance of transport in the modern urban spaces, even though some differences appear, showing that the transport is different from what happens inside a living organism. The results might be understood as a guide of the general behavior of cities to be taken into account in urban planning.