Published in Physics World, 3 Feb 2010
How do commuters move around in big cities? Most people would assume that they all do pretty much the same thing: travel from the outskirts to the centre, and then back again. Yet according to a group of physicists in the UK and France, this is not the case.
“The popular conception of a city – that people work in the centre and live around the edge – is, to a certain extent, a gross simplification of what actually happens,” says Michael Batty, director of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London (UCL). “The notion that one could simplify the sort of complexity that is evident is probably a non-starter.” […]
The rest of this article is available here.