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research article

The Scale-Dependent Behaviour of Cities: A Cross-Cities Multiscale Driver Analysis of Urban Energy Use

Bettignies, Yves
•
Meirelles, Joao  
•
Fernandez, Gabriela
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June 2, 2019
Sustainability

Hosting more than half of the world population, cities are currently responsible for two thirds of the global energy use and three quarters of the global CO2 emissions related to energy use. As humanity becomes more urbanized, urban systems are becoming a major nexus of global sustainability. Various studies have tried to pinpoint urban energy use drivers in order to find actionable levers to mitigate consumption and its associated environmental effects. Some of the approaches, mainly coming from complexity science and industrial ecology disciplines, use city-scale data to find power-laws relating to different types of energy use metrics with urban features at a city-scale. By doing so, cities' internal complexity and heterogeneity are not explicitly addressed. Moreover, to our knowledge, no studies have yet explicitly addressed the potential scale dependency of such drivers. Drivers might not be transferable to other scales and yield undesired effects. In the present study, power-law relations are examined for 10 cities worldwide at city scale and infra-city scale, and the results are compared across scales. Relations are made across three urban features for three energy use intensity metrics. The results show that energy use drivers are in fact scale-dependent and are city-dependent for intra-urban territories.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.3390/su11123246
Web of Science ID

WOS:000473753700016

Author(s)
Bettignies, Yves
Meirelles, Joao  
Fernandez, Gabriela
Meinherz, Franziska  
Hoekman, Paul
Bouillard, Philippe
Athanassiadis, Aristide
Date Issued

2019-06-02

Published in
Sustainability
Volume

11

Issue

12

Article Number

3246

Subjects

Green & Sustainable Science & Technology

•

Environmental Sciences

•

Environmental Studies

•

Science & Technology - Other Topics

•

Environmental Sciences & Ecology

•

urban energy drivers

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urban metabolism

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urban scaling

•

scaling

•

energy

•

power-law

•

multiscale analysis

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cross-city analysis

•

systems-approach

•

economic-growth

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hong-kong

•

consumption

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metabolism

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policy

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income

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requirements

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causality

•

ecology

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
HERUS  
Available on Infoscience
July 20, 2019
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/159259
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