Intra-settlement scaling across the urban–rural continuum: material stocks, service provisioning, and greenhouse gas emissions in the contiguous United States

Abstract

Research on urban scaling laws suggests that cities with larger populations tend to be more resource-efficient, yet whether these findings hold across spatial scales, varying definitions of ‘urban’ and the entire rural–urban continuum remains unresolved. Herein, we leverage high-resolution maps for the entire contiguous United States of America to examine how built environment material stocks, service provisioning, and operational greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions scale with population size across the country. Results show that residential building footprints, i.e., the ground area covered by buildings, useful floor area, and material stocks scale moderately sub-linearly (scaling exponent β in the [0.82, 0.89] interval). Non-residential buildings and mobility infrastructure (area, materials) scale more strongly sub-linearly ( β in the [0.42, 0.74] interval). These patterns are robust across sensitivity tests. Furthermore, people living in high-density urban areas require less than half of per capita building footprints, mobility infrastructure area, total infrastructure mass, and residential on-road GHG emissions, compared to residents in low-density rural areas, demonstrating substantial environmental benefits of dense settlements.

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