Physicist Geoffrey West has found that simple, mathematical laws govern the properties of cities — that wealth, crime rate, walking speed and many other aspects of a city can be deduced from a single number: the city’s population. In this mind-bending talk from TEDGlobal he shows how it works and how similar laws hold for organisms and corporations.
http://www.ted.com/talks/geoffrey_west_the_surprising_math_of_cities_and_corporations.html
Tagged with ted cities urbanisation population corporations
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.
Tagged with cities geoffrey west scale longnow
We look at the world’s greenest cities and how a greener planet can start where population is most dense.
Tagged with environment cities urban green
@radical.media CEO Jon Kamen presents 19.20.21, an initiative to research and document the first 19 cities to reach 20 million inhabitants during the 21st century.
Kamen: Life inside the planet’s super cities will soon be one of the great challenges of the 21st century.
http://fora.tv/2008/12/11/Jon_Kamen_Mass_Urbanization_and_the_192021_Project
Tagged with cities city urban suburbs growth population future super cities foratv