Understanding these similarities could help us build better cities in the future, says a team led by climate scientist Isabella Capel-Timmes from University College London (UCL).

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Scientists explained the rapid development of the British capital in the last 180 years with the help of a mathematical model. It showed how the city evolved into the sprawling metropolis we know today. The original London that existed in the Middle Ages, known as the “square mile”, was 600 times smaller than the current size of the city.

To achieve such a large scale The capital grew like a cancerous tumor from 1831 to 2011. Mathematical models show that before the advent of the urban railway network, London’s population was concentrated in a small central area. Long-distance travel to the suburbs was expensive and difficult. The use of trains enabled the transition to a suburban lifestyle, allowing residents to live increasingly further from the centre.

According to an international team of researchers, such dynamics comparable to how blood vessels sprout and branch in cancerous tumorsIt opens new “pathways” in developing tissues. This process, called angiogenesis, allows the cancer to grow larger than a few millimeters. Blood vessels carry oxygen and nutrients to cells farther away by diffusion.

The same principle applies to many of the world’s major cities, such as Washington, Paris, and Sydney, and various public transportation systems other than trains.

When scientists from UCL teamed up with researchers from the University of Sydney they found: Australian port city has grown like London. Using data from 1851 to 2011, they modeled the side-by-side development of Sydney’s rail system and urban population.

As with London, the two biggest factors driving the Australian city’s growth were population size and interconnectedness. These are the same factors that control the growth of cancerous tissue..

The study’s authors explain that the world today is experiencing “accelerated urbanization and digitalization,” with cities “typically viewed as large machines or logistics systems that can be controlled through top-down interventions.” But in reality they claim that cities “They behave as complex adaptive systems that develop to a certain extent like living organisms”.

In fact, this analogy with cancer is not new because architects and scientists have made such a comparison before. But new research is only now providing useful quantitative comparisons between urban and biological growth. The team hopes urban planners will look to biology for future solutions. For example, policies aimed at regulating the development of highways, subways, and rail networks may limit future urban growth patterns; just as strategies aimed at controlling vascularization and interactions between cells may reduce cancer growth.