Urban growth tendency of electrical cables in the Costa Rican Metropolitan Area

Abstract In modern society, the majority of the population lives in cities. Thus, it becomes relevant to be able to predict the growth of social indicators and infrastructure, among other factors, in order to make proper decisions for the city’s development. Such a prediction can be obtained by means of an appropriate mathematical model that describes this growth. However, cities are complex systems influenced by many variables, and it is difficult to obtain precise mathematical descriptions for them. Nevertheless, it was found that the growth of numerous urban indicators can be described as a function of population given by a power law, and that the growth of infrastructure in most cities obeys a sublinear power law with an exponent close to 0.8. In this research, we verify the sublinear power tendency of the infrastructure development in Costa Rica, presented as the scaling of electrical cable length. We obtain for the first time experimental evidence on the power scaling laws corresponding to the growth of electrical cable length for two cities in San Jose Province, Costa Rica, and compare them with the one presented for Germany. This provides a first model for the prediction of electrical cable growth in the Costa Rican Metropolitan Area, and enables the possibility of using the same methods to obtain the growth tendency of other types of infrastructure.