The concept of city or urban resilience has emerged as one of the key challenges for the next decades. As a consequence, institutions like the United Nations or Rockefeller Foundation have embraced initiatives that increase or improve it. These efforts translate into funded programs both for action on the ground and to develop quantification of resilience, under the for of an index. Ironically, on the academic side there is no clear consensus regarding how resilience should be quantified, or what it exactly refers to in the urban context. Here we attempt to link both extremes providing an example of how to exploit large, publicly available, worldwide urban datasets, to produce objective insight into one of the possible dimensions of urban resilience. We do so via well-established methods in complexity science, such as percolation theory –which has a long tradition at providing valuable information on the vulnerability in complex systems. Our findings uncover large differences among studied cities, both regarding their infrastructural fragility and the imbalances in the distribution of critical services.

 

Robustness and Resilience of cities around the world
Sofiane Abbar, Tahar Zanouda, Javier Borge-Holthoefer

http://arxiv.org/abs/1608.01709

Source: arxiv.org

The living-together of distinct organisms in a single termite nest along with the termite builder colony, is emblematic in its ecological and evolutionary significance. On top of preserving biodiversity, these interspecific and intraspecific symbioses provide useful examples of interindividual associations thought to underly transitions in organic evolution. Being interindividual in nature, such processes may involve emergent phenomena and hence call for analytical solutions provided by computing tools and modelling, as opposed to classical biological methods of analysis. Here we provide selected examples of such solutions, showing that termite studies may profit from a symbiotic-like link with computing science to open up wide and new research avenues in ecology and evolution.

 

Fruitful symbioses between termites and computers
Og DeSouza, Elio Tuci, Octavio Miramontes

http://arxiv.org/abs/1608.05367

Source: arxiv.org

Despite the traditional focus of network science on static networks, most networked systems of scientific interest are characterized by temporal links. By disrupting the paths, link temporality has been shown to frustrate many dynamical processes on networks, from information spreading to accessibility. Considering the ubiquity of temporal networks in nature, we must ask: Are there any advantages of the networks’ temporality? Here we develop an analytical framework to explore the control properties of temporal networks, arriving at the counterintuitive conclusion that temporal networks, compared to their static (i.e. aggregated) counterparts, reach controllability faster, demand orders of magnitude less control energy, and the control trajectories, through which the system reaches its final states, are significantly more compact than those characterizing their static counterparts. The combination of analytical, numerical and empirical results demonstrates that temporality ensures a degree of flexibility that would be unattainable in static networks, significantly enhancing our ability to control them.

 

The fundamental advantages of temporal networks
Aming Li, Sean P. Cornelius, Yang-Yu Liu, Long Wang, Albert-László Barabási

http://arxiv.org/abs/1607.06168

Source: arxiv.org