2025 Articles

Global Consistency of Urban Scaling Evidenced by Remote Sensing

Xu, Zhibang; Xu, Gang; Lan, Ting; Li, Xi; Chen, Zuoqi; Cui, Hao; Zhou, Zhengzi; Wang, Haowei; Jiao, Limin; Small, Christopher

The urban scaling theory (UST) strives for a universal taxonomy that depicts relationships among urban indicators (e.g. energy consumption, economic output) with city size. However, the lack of international agreement on city de nitions and statistics complicates cross-country comparisons of urban scaling performance. Remote sensing provides a uniform standard for measuring cities around the world. To scrutinize the consistency of UST, we quanti ed changes in remotely sensed urban built-up areas (UBA) and nighttime lights (NTL) distributions from 11,581 cities in 61 countries spanning 2000–2020, representing urban physical elements and socioeconomic activities, respectively. We nd that UBA is well described by UST in all analyzed countries, while NTL aligns with 98% of them. UST quanti ed by remote sensing shows greater robustness than country-dependent aggregate statistics. We also observed disparities of scaling exponents (β) among countries, with UBA all being sublinear (β < 1), and NTL ranging from 0.46 to 1.22 with a median of 0.94. Both UST and rank-size distributions of urban area and population show stronger scaling relationships for countries with larger networks of built environments, (Brazil, China, Germany, Japan, Russia, United States) suggesting that both size and evolution of urban systems impact the underlying scaling processes. Comparison of scaling properties of remotely sensed UBA and NTL captures complementary physical characteristics of built environments while minimizing the Modi able Area Unit Problem introduced using spatially aggregated metrics within administrative units. Our ndings highlight the consistency of urban growth patterns while con rming the systematic socioeconomic disparities among urban systems of varying size and growth trajectory.