The ability of cities to recuperate from disturbances and return to their evolutionary pathways depends, first and foremost, on the type of damage that the shock created. But in addition, it depends on how information is transmitted in the urban system and on how noise filters distort the...

While an ever-growing percentage of the world’s population is urban, the rate at which cities grow is not uniform. The lifetime of individual cities includes periods of fast growth, slow growth and periods of shrinkage. There exists an extensive literature concerned with possible means to...