Scaling laws and the modern city

The inter-relations and the complexity of modern urban spaces are difficult to analyse in a way that allows improving living conditions or help to ascertain optimal decisions for saving energy or improving sustainability. Carefully designed decisions and guidelines might produce unexpected results because of particularities, or complex sets of reactions from residents or economic counterparts. Complexity tends to increase with size, such as when, for instance, services tend to concentrate in large agglomerations, and transportation needs take on critical importance. Complex systems such as living organisms are known to follow approximate relationships as scaling laws between the variables that describe them. Some of these kinds of relationships are tested in relation to modern developed urban spaces, in which it is possible to find a reasonable continuity with the types of scales seen in living organisms, and some preliminary conclusions are drawn.