CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2014
| Author | Khan, Fouad Muhammad |
|---|---|
| Title | Scaling in Cities as an Indicator of Energy Consumption: What Fractal Analysis Could Tell Us About Resilience and Disparity in Complex Systems |
| Summary | Climate change and global resource extraction peaks are problems that may require a complete overhaul of the fundamental paradigms of our civilization in order to be solved. Paradigm changes are implemented in societies first and foremost through a redefinition of indicators. Our current indicator systems do not take into account the complexity of human social, economic and material systems and prioritize “efficiency” and “growth”. The objective of this research was to develop an indicator for one type of anthropogenic complex systems, i.e. cities that took into account the complex nature of the system and provided a quantitative way to prioritize alternative values such as “resilience” and “sustainability”. Scaling has been identified as one measure of complexity in a system, which is relatively easy to compute and comprehend. Here, I have developed a scaling indicator for cities based on fractal dimension. US block wise census data was used to calculate the exponent of the power-law distribution of population density across different census blocks in a city. The power-law, or scaling indicator, herein referred to as the fractal dimension was then compared to parameters such as population, area, population density, gasoline sales, gasoline sales per capita and area, and carbon emissions and carbon emissions per capita. It was noted that the fractal dimension had a power-law correlation with gasoline sales per unit area in the cities. The analysis was then extended a second complex system, i.e. national economies. Fractal dimension or scaling of percentages of incomes across the highest earning to lowest earning twenty percent segments of the population was calculated using World Bank economic data for 2004 (the year for which most extensive dataset was available). The relationship between this scaling indicator and energy usage per capita in countries was again found to be a power-law with an r-square value of more than 0.35 (similar to the correlation between urban fractal dimension and gasoline sales per area in cities). A new planning tool is developed to allow incorporation of consideration of these complexity indicators in development planning for cities and national economies. The planning-plane allows for visualization of the impacts of particular interventions in cities (e.g. housing scheme) and economies (e.g. changes in tax-code) on energy consumption parameters across two independent variables (e.g. population and fractal dimension) instead of the usual practice of using one indicator (e.g. population density). The similar nature of the correlation between scaling indicators and energy consumption indicators in two completely different anthropogenic complex systems hints at some underlying similarity in the mechanism through which these complex systems develop. It is hypothesized here that steeper scaling (e.g. higher income differences in economies) in complex systems makes good system regulation more energy intensive, thereby affecting the energy consumption parameters as observed in this study. Steeper scaling also thus negatively affects the effectiveness of regulation in complex systems and makes the system more prone to internal shocks. Planning system evolution for resilience would thus benefit from consideration of scaling indicators in the planning process. |
| Supervisor | Pinter, Laszlo |
| Department | Environment Sciences and Policy PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2014/khan_fouad.pdf |
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