Why Cities Keep Growing, Corporations and People Always Die, and Life Gets Faster

From edge.org: http://edge.org/conversation/geoffrey-west

For the past few years Geoffrey West, a physicist former president of SantaFe Institute has been calling for "a science of how city growth affects society and environment".

After years of focusing on scalability of cities and urban environments, West, is now is bringing "some of the powerful techniques, ideas, and paradigms developed in physics over into the biological and social sciences". He is looking at a bigger picture and asking the following question: "to what extent can biology and social organization (which are both quintessential complex adaptive systems) be put in a more quantitative, analytic, mathemitizable, predictive framework so that we can understand them in the way that we understand ‘simple physical systems’?’

Also huffduffed as…

  1. Why Cities Keep Growing, Corporations and People Always Die, and Life Gets Faster

    —Huffduffed by lesc on July 15th, 2011

  2. Why Cities Keep Growing, Corporations and People Always Die, and Life Gets Faster

    —Huffduffed by KurtL on August 10th, 2011

  3. Why Cities Keep Growing, Corporations and People Always Die, and Life Gets Faster

    —Huffduffed by matro on July 25th, 2011

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  1. TED Radio Hour: Geoffrey West: What Does Nature Teach Us About Cities? : NPR

    Theoretical physicist Geoffrey West shows how a deeper look at the world’s urban environments yields surprising finds in the search for a sustainable future.

    http://www.npr.org/2012/06/15/154806578/what-does-nature-teach-us-about-cities?ft=1&f=57

    —Huffduffed by leifwickland 10 months ago

  2. Cities, Design and Climate Change

    With cities contributing upwards of 75 per cent of global carbon emissions, urban design is increasingly important when planning for climate change. This discussion examines the creative urban design solutions coming out of the world’s cities. Saskia Sassen is Robert S Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. Richard Sennett is professor of sociology at LSE and NYU. Jonathon Porritti s the chair of the sustainable development commission and founder and director of Forum for the Future.

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  3. Why Cities Keep on Growing, Corporations Always Die, and Life Gets Faster

    As organisms, cities, and companies scale up, they all gain in efficiency, but then they vary. The bigger an organism, the slower. Yet the bigger a city is, the faster it runs. And cities are structurally immortal, while corporations are structurally doomed. Scaling up always creates new problems; cities can innovate faster than the problems indefinitely, while corporations cannot.

    These revolutionary findings come from Geoffrey West’s examination of vast quantities of data on the metabolic/economic behavior of organisms and organizations. A theoretical physicist, West was president of Santa Fe Institute from 2005 to 2009 and founded the high energy physics group at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

    —Huffduffed by boxman one year ago