Check out the episode:

You can find the transcripts through this link.

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Are you interested in the connection between urban evolution and their population size?

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Debate of the article titled The origins of scaling in cities from 2023, by Louis M. A. Bettencourt, published in the Science journal.

This is a great preparation to our next interview with Greg Lindsay in episode 422 talking about the city as an engine for creative collisions.

Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see the scaling relations of urban areas. This article suggests that urban efficiency can be measured by balancing the benefits of social interactions against the energy costs of moving people and information.

Find the article through this link.

Abstract: Despite the increasing importance of cities in human societies, our ability to understand them scientifically and manage them in practice has remained limited. The greatest difficulties to any scientific approach to cities have resulted from their many interdependent facets, as social, economic, infrastructural, and spatial complex systems that exist in similar but changing forms over a huge range of scales. Here, I show how all cities may evolve according to a small set of basic principles that operate locally. A theoretical framework was developed to predict the average social, spatial, and infrastructural properties of cities as a set of scaling relations that apply to all urban systems. Confirmation of these predictions was observed for thousands of cities worldwide, from many urban systems at different levels of development. Measures of urban efficiency, capturing the balance between socioeconomic outputs and infrastructural costs, were shown to be independent of city size and might be a useful means to evaluate urban planning strategies.

Connecting episodes you might be interested in:

• No.409R – The case for economic growth as the path to better human wellbeing
• No.410 – Interview with Casey Handmer about the need for economic growth
• No.419R – Green growth or degrowth?
• No.420 – Interview with Josh Dorfman about green growth

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