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Urban occupational structures as information networks: The effect on network density of increasing number of occupations
Urban economies are composed of diverse activities, embodied in labor occupations, which depend on one another to produce goods and services. Yet little is known about how the nature and intensity of these interdependences change as cities increase in population size and economic complexity. Underst...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Public Library of Science
2018
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5937748/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29734354 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0196915 |
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author | Shutters, Shade T. Lobo, José Muneepeerakul, Rachata Strumsky, Deborah Mellander, Charlotta Brachert, Matthias Farinha, Teresa Bettencourt, Luis M. A. |
author_facet | Shutters, Shade T. Lobo, José Muneepeerakul, Rachata Strumsky, Deborah Mellander, Charlotta Brachert, Matthias Farinha, Teresa Bettencourt, Luis M. A. |
author_sort | Shutters, Shade T. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Urban economies are composed of diverse activities, embodied in labor occupations, which depend on one another to produce goods and services. Yet little is known about how the nature and intensity of these interdependences change as cities increase in population size and economic complexity. Understanding the relationship between occupational interdependencies and the number of occupations defining an urban economy is relevant because interdependence within a networked system has implications for system resilience and for how easily can the structure of the network be modified. Here, we represent the interdependencies among occupations in a city as a non-spatial information network, where the strengths of interdependence between pairs of occupations determine the strengths of the links in the network. Using those quantified link strengths we calculate a single metric of interdependence–or connectedness–which is equivalent to the density of a city’s weighted occupational network. We then examine urban systems in six industrialized countries, analyzing how the density of urban occupational networks changes with network size, measured as the number of unique occupations present in an urban workforce. We find that in all six countries, density, or economic interdependence, increases superlinearly with the number of distinct occupations. Because connections among occupations represent flows of information, we provide evidence that connectivity scales superlinearly with network size in information networks. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5937748 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2018 |
publisher | Public Library of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-59377482018-05-18 Urban occupational structures as information networks: The effect on network density of increasing number of occupations Shutters, Shade T. Lobo, José Muneepeerakul, Rachata Strumsky, Deborah Mellander, Charlotta Brachert, Matthias Farinha, Teresa Bettencourt, Luis M. A. PLoS One Research Article Urban economies are composed of diverse activities, embodied in labor occupations, which depend on one another to produce goods and services. Yet little is known about how the nature and intensity of these interdependences change as cities increase in population size and economic complexity. Understanding the relationship between occupational interdependencies and the number of occupations defining an urban economy is relevant because interdependence within a networked system has implications for system resilience and for how easily can the structure of the network be modified. Here, we represent the interdependencies among occupations in a city as a non-spatial information network, where the strengths of interdependence between pairs of occupations determine the strengths of the links in the network. Using those quantified link strengths we calculate a single metric of interdependence–or connectedness–which is equivalent to the density of a city’s weighted occupational network. We then examine urban systems in six industrialized countries, analyzing how the density of urban occupational networks changes with network size, measured as the number of unique occupations present in an urban workforce. We find that in all six countries, density, or economic interdependence, increases superlinearly with the number of distinct occupations. Because connections among occupations represent flows of information, we provide evidence that connectivity scales superlinearly with network size in information networks. Public Library of Science 2018-05-07 /pmc/articles/PMC5937748/ /pubmed/29734354 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0196915 Text en © 2018 Shutters et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Shutters, Shade T. Lobo, José Muneepeerakul, Rachata Strumsky, Deborah Mellander, Charlotta Brachert, Matthias Farinha, Teresa Bettencourt, Luis M. A. Urban occupational structures as information networks: The effect on network density of increasing number of occupations |
title | Urban occupational structures as information networks: The effect on network density of increasing number of occupations |
title_full | Urban occupational structures as information networks: The effect on network density of increasing number of occupations |
title_fullStr | Urban occupational structures as information networks: The effect on network density of increasing number of occupations |
title_full_unstemmed | Urban occupational structures as information networks: The effect on network density of increasing number of occupations |
title_short | Urban occupational structures as information networks: The effect on network density of increasing number of occupations |
title_sort | urban occupational structures as information networks: the effect on network density of increasing number of occupations |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5937748/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29734354 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0196915 |
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