I think I've finally fully absorbed and adopted the belief that cities are the eminent playgrounds for solving our planetary challenges. But Santa Fe Institute author Geoffrey West makes it clear why we are so drawn to cities - they are more efficient. As in biology when organisms grow they require less resources for the same amount of output. This is why our problems also scale with growth - this efficiency is not controlled, so for example crime is more efficient as well. So what are the self reinforcing cycles that propagate undesirable efficiency. What might act as inhibitors for selected strains of development(like crime) within the overall systemic scaling efficiency?
According to the Santa Fe Institute site, this has to do with the interplay between innovation, resource appropriation, and consumption. Specifically, "as population grows, major innovation cycles must be generated at a continually accelerating rate to sustain growth and avoid stagnation or collapse." Even more striking, they find that "local urban dynamics display long-term memory, so cities under or outperforming their size expectation maintain such disadvantage for decades!" (emphasis my own :-))
Here are selected passages from the article.
According to the Santa Fe Institute site, this has to do with the interplay between innovation, resource appropriation, and consumption. Specifically, "as population grows, major innovation cycles must be generated at a continually accelerating rate to sustain growth and avoid stagnation or collapse." Even more striking, they find that "local urban dynamics display long-term memory, so cities under or outperforming their size expectation maintain such disadvantage for decades!" (emphasis my own :-))
Here are selected passages from the article.
 |
| Fractal growth in New York (NASA night Satellite View) |
The universal metabolic rate power law
The best known of these is for metabolic rate (the rate at which energy is needed to sustain an organism), which scales as a so-called power law with an exponent of ¾ over an astonishing 27 orders of magnitude. In English, this means that doubling the size of an organism from, say, 10g to 20g, or from 100kg to 200kg, only requires an increase in metabolic energy (food intake) of about 75%, rather than 100%, as might naively be expected. Remarkably, this systematic economy of scale permeates biology. Similar systematic scaling laws hold for almost any measurable physiological trait or life-history event: life spans, growth rates, DNA nucleotide substitution rates, genome lengths, tree heights, and the mass of cerebral grey matter.
The theory predicted, in agreement with observation, that, from cells and whales to community structures, the pace of life systematically and predictably slows down with increasing size, and that this is accompanied by increasing economies of scale. Much of this body of work became known as the metabolic theory of ecology.
Its application in cities
Infrastructural measures, such as numbers of gas stations and lengths of roads and electrical cables, all scale sublinearly with city population size, manifesting economies of scale with a common exponent around 0.85 (rather than the 0.75 observed in biology). More significantly, however, was the emergence of a new phenomenon not observed in biology, namely, superlinear scaling: socioeconomic quantities involving human interaction, such as wages, patents, AIDS cases, and violent crime all scale with a common exponent around 1.15. Thus, on a per capita basis, human interaction metrics (which encompass innovation and wealth creation) systematically increase with city size while, to the same degree, infrastructural metrics manifest increasing savings. Put slightly differently: with every doubling of city size, whether from 20,000 to 40,000 people or 2M to 4M people, socioeconomic quantities – the good, the bad, and the ugly – increase by approximately 15% per person with a concomitant 15% savings on all city infrastructure-related costs.
The larger the city the greater the efficiency
The world is urbanizing at an unprecedented pace, requiring new and growing cities, especially in India, China, and parts of the developing world. No wonder cities have continued to grow. When we move to a city within an urban system that is twice as large, we become, on average, 15% more wealthy, more productive, more creative…and we do this using a fraction of the infrastructure. The discovery of economies of scale and the resulting fruits of innovation and wealth creation brought a fundamentally new dynamic beyond classic biology to the planet. This surprising universality is observed in urban systems in the United States, China, Japan, Europe, and Latin America and transcends history, geography, and culture. What a remarkable outcome manifested in the emergent behavior resulting from human interaction and social networking!
The key to planetary sustainablility lies in cities
Perhaps of even greater relevance is that the long-term sustainability of the planet is inextricably linked to the fate of our cities. We are urbanizing at an exponential rate, with more than half of the world’s population now living in urban centers. The biggest global challenges we are facing from climate change, the environment, availability of energy and resources, social unrest, and financial markets are generated in cities, but cities are also the hubs of innovation, wealth creation, and power. Put slightly differently, cities may well be the problem, but they are also the solution. This strongly suggests that there is a great urgency to develop a more quantitative, predictive, computational framework that can complement the traditional, more qualitative, narrative approaches to understanding cities – a framework that can help inform today’s and tomorrow’s practitioners and policy makers.