Compare methods

	Floor Area Ratio Analysis	Urban Scaling Laws
Field	Urban Studies	Urban Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Regression model
Year of origin	1916	2007
Originator	Zoning and planning practice (codified in mid-20th-century density regulation)	Luís Bettencourt & Geoffrey West
Type	Ratio of total building floor area to plot/lot area	Power-law regression of urban indicators against population size
Seminal source	Ben-Joseph, E. (2005). The Code of the City: Standards and the Hidden Language of Place Making. MIT Press. ISBN: 9780262025744	Bettencourt, L. M. A., Lobo, J., Helbing, D., Kühnert, C., & West, G. B. (2007). Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(17), 7301–7306.
Aliases	Plot Ratio Analysis, Floor Space Index, FAR Analysis, Building Bulk Ratio	Urban Scaling, Settlement Scaling Theory, Power-Law Urban Scaling, Superlinear and Sublinear Urban Scaling
Related	4	4
Summary	Floor area ratio (FAR), also called plot ratio or floor space index, is the ratio of a building's total floor area to the area of the lot it sits on, and it is the workhorse metric of zoning-based density control. A FAR of 2.0 means a building has twice as much floor space as its plot, achievable as a two-storey building covering the whole lot or a four-storey building covering half of it. Embedded in zoning codes since New York's 1916 ordinance and analysed in planning texts such as Ben-Joseph's study of urban codes, FAR analysis quantifies development intensity, sets buildable limits, and links regulation to the form and density of the built environment.	Urban scaling laws describe how the aggregate properties of cities — wealth, innovation, infrastructure, crime — change systematically with population size, following power laws rather than growing in simple proportion. Building on the 2007 work of Luís Bettencourt, Geoffrey West and colleagues, the framework shows that socioeconomic outputs typically scale superlinearly (a doubling of population more than doubles GDP and patents) while infrastructure scales sublinearly (larger cities need proportionally fewer roads and cables per person), with a single exponent β capturing the regularity across an entire urban system.