Urban Economic Structures as Multidimensional Networks: A Complex Systems Framework for Analyzing Economic Development Trajectories

Figure 1

Extracting additional information from distributions to build a network. Starting with distributions across spatial units (1), raw counts are converted to presence-absence data (2), and then compared to null models of colocation to quantify the interaction or interdependence between every pair of economic entities (3). Those interdependencies can be positive or negative and are used to construct a network in which nodes are the economic entities of interest and pairwise interdependencies are the link weights between nodes.