As part of our collaboration with Google AI, Jose Ramasco and Henry Kautz our paper on Urban hierarchies is now out in Nature Communications
We study intra-city population flows in hundreds of cities worldwide and extract areas of high socioeconomic activity. Based on the dynamics between these high-activity areas, we infer a new measure of urban structure, the so-called flow hierarchy. The extent to which cities are hierarchical, so-to-speak, with respect to the dynamical organization of these high activity areas, carries remarkably rich signatures of a variety of urban indicators such as transportation, pollution, and health. An added benefit of our framework is that it can be deployed in those parts of the world, that are data-poor by leveraging on LBSN’s.