Dynamic roughening of cities driven by multiplicative noise (opens in new tab)

The evolution of urban landscapes is rapidly altering the surface of our planet. Yet our understanding of the urbanization phenomenon remains far from complete. A fundamental challenge is to describe spatiotemporal changes in the built environment, both vertical and horizontal. In this work, we model global building-height dynamics as a zero-dimensional geometric Brownian motion (GBM): multiplicative noise produces stochastic fluctuations around a drift linked to economic growth. To account f...