Check out the episode:

You can find the transcript through this link.

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Are you interested in how urban systems scale?

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Debate of the article titled Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities from 2007, by Luís M. A. Bettencourt, José Lobo, Dirk Helbing, and Geoffrey B. West, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States.

This is a great preparation to our next interview with Geoffrey West in episode 470 talking about how the rules of scaling applies to every system, from biology to cities.

Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see how population size fundamentally dictates the growth, innovation and infrastructure of cities. This article proves the urban superlinear growth creates a productive but precarious dynamic where cities must generate continual cycles of innovation to avoid stagnation and total collapse.

Find the article through this link.

Abstract: Humanity has just crossed a major landmark in its history with the majority of people now living in cities. Cities have long been known to be society’s predominant engine of innovation and wealth creation, yet they are also its main source of crime, pollution, and disease. The inexorable trend toward urbanization worldwide presents an urgent challenge for developing a predictive, quantitative theory of urban organization and sustainable development. Here we present empirical evidence indicating that the processes relating urbanization to economic development and knowledge creation are very general, being shared by all cities belonging to the same urban system and sustained across different nations and times. Many diverse properties of cities from patent production and personal income to electrical cable length are shown to be power law functions of population size with scaling exponents, β, that fall into distinct universality classes. Quantities reflecting wealth creation and innovation have β ≈1.2 >1 (increasing returns), whereas those accounting for infrastructure display β ≈0.8 <1 (economies of scale). We predict that the pace of social life in the city increases with population size, in quantitative agreement with data, and we discuss how cities are similar to, and differ from, biological organisms, for which β<1. Finally, we explore possible consequences of these scaling relations by deriving growth equations, which quantify the dramatic difference between growth fueled by innovation versus that driven by economies of scale. This difference suggests that, as population grows, major innovation cycles must be generated at a continually accelerating rate to sustain growth and avoid stagnation or collapse.

Connected episodes you might be interested:

• No.390 – Interview with Robin Hanson about the importance of diversity of thought
• No.421R – The origins of scaling in cities
• No.422 – Interview with Greg Lindsay about urban scaling

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