A Review of Percolation-like Transitions in Cities and Landscapes

We review papers analyzing percolation-like transitions in cities, urban systems, and landscapes. We organize their presentation according to (i) landscape ecology, (ii) city morphology and properties, (iii) modeling city growth, (iv) traffic dynamics, and (v) forests and vegetation. A closer look at the second group reveals that, overall, the works are limited to a small number of different control and order parameters. We hierarchically cluster the respective papers. Related to connectivity and fragmentation, percolation-like transitions arise in various complex, natural and artificial structures in cities and landscapes. More research is needed to better understand the differences between predictions from percolation theory and findings from real-world data.