Built-up structure criticality

The built-up land represents an important type of an overall landscape. In this paper, the built-up land structure in the largest cities in the Czech Republic and some selected cities in the USA is analysed using the framework of statistical physics. We calculate the variance of the total area and of the count of the built-up land plots contained inside discs of different radii. In both cases, the variance as a function of the disc radius follows a power law with exponents that are comparable through different cities. The study is based on the cadastral data from the Czech Republic and on the building footprints from GIS data in the USA.