Physicists are using the math of flowing fluids to measure how fast big corporations are gobbling up land.
arXiv · March 17, 2026 · 2603.13715
The Takeaway
By treating a massive real-estate development as a physical system, researchers used fractal geometry and 'information distance' to quantify how quickly communal land is converted into capital. They discovered that urban growth follows predictable physical laws of percolation rather than random development.
From the abstract
Large-scale land enclosure for speculative mega-development constitutes a non-equilibrium spatial process whose velocity, topology, and irreversibility remain poorly quantified. We study the Pantai Indah Kapuk 2 (PIK2) coastal mega-development north of Jakarta, Indonesia, using eight years (2017--2024) of Sentinel-2 land-use/land-cover (LULC) data at 10-meter resolution. The landscape is projected onto a Marxian probability simplex partitioning terrestrial pixels into Commons, Agrarian, and Capi