Diffusive Resettlement: Irreversible Urban Transitions in Closed Systems.

Area of Science:

• Urban dynamics
• Statistical physics
• Computational social science

Background:

• Understanding urban evolution is crucial for sustainable city planning.
• Existing models often simplify complex intra-urban population dynamics.
• Migration patterns significantly shape a city's spatial structure over time.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a novel non-equilibrium framework for modeling city evolution.
• To analyze intra-urban migration as an irreversible diffusive process.
• To predict long-term spatial structures and equilibrium population distributions.

Main Methods:

• Developed a non-equilibrium theoretical framework.
• Modeled intra-urban migration as a diffusive process.
• Validated the framework using migration data from Australian capital cities.

Main Results:

• The framework successfully models city evolution based on migration data.
• Identified two distinct population groups with different relocation frequencies.
• Interpreted these groups as components of a binary fluid mixture with unique relaxation times.

Conclusions:

• The proposed non-equilibrium framework provides a robust method for studying urban dynamics.
• The binary fluid analogy offers new insights into population heterogeneity and mobility.
• The model enables accurate long-term predictions of urban spatial structures and population distributions.