[p2p-research] Is There a "Moore's Law" for Cities? World's Leading Experts Say "Yes"

[Ryan]

  Sent to you by Ryan via Google Reader: Is There a "Moore's Law" for
Cities? World's Leading Experts Say "Yes" via The Daily Galaxy: Great
Discoveries Channel by Casey Kazan Daily Galaxy Editorial Staff on
9/29/09



Several thousand years ago the evolution of social organizations in the
form of cities brought a new dynamic to the planet that seems to be
uniquely human: People actually do walk on average faster in larger
cities whereas heart rates decrease as animal size increases. With the
city, it seems, mankind has created an "organism" operating beyond the
bounds of biology.



Geoffrey West, President and Distinguished Professor of the Santa Fe
Institute, led a team of scientists from various institutions that
found that measures of wealth creation and innovation, increase with
size, in such a way that doubling the size of a city increases its
economic productivity per person by about 15%. This "universal"
behavior is seen worldwide from China, to Europe, to the USA. Their
results show that all cities share common underlying dynamics and that,
on the average, they are scaled versions of one another; despite
obvious superficial characteristics, New York, Boston and Santa Fe are
to a large extent scaled versions of one another!

For many, cities are viewed as the principal source of our social and
environmental problems such as crime, pollution, poverty and, often,
incidence of disease, but cities have also always been
disproportionately the birthplaces for most of human prosperity,
innovation and culture.



Drawing from insights from research in biology that revealed the
theoretical underpinnings relating the extraordinary similarity in the
structure, organization and dynamics of organisms of vastly different
sizes from cells to ecosystems, the team analyzed a large number of
urban indicators in the USA, China and several European countries,
covering measures of economic productivity, innovation, demographics,
crime, public health, infrastructure and patterns of human behavior.
They discovered that all these quantities follow simple statistical
scaling relations with population, predictable changes from small
cities to the largest megalopolis.

The results are particularly relevant at a time where for the first
time in human history, the majority of people worldwide are now living
in cities. Yet, urbanization and its consequences remain poorly
understood. What is fascinating and surprising about our results is
that they show that the good things about cities - such as their
innovation - and the bad ones - such as crime and the incidence of
certain diseases - seem to increase predictably in the same proportion
as cities become larger. Faster and faster rates of per capita growth
with larger urban populations means the pace of life increases
measurably with city size, as we have all experienced. Cities are
social accelerators.

The researchers showed that city growth driven by wealth creation
increases at a rate that is faster than exponential; the only way to
avoid collapse as a population outstrips the finite resources available
to it is through constant cycles of innovation. These effectively
re-engineer the initial conditions of growth. But the greater the
absolute population, the smaller the relative return on each such
investment - new ideas must come ever faster. Thus, the bigger the
city, the faster life is; but the rate at which life gets faster must
itself accelerate to maintain the city as a growing concern so much so
that to maintain growth, major innovations must now occur on
time-scales that are significantly shorter than a human lifespan.

"In this crucial sense cities are completely different from biological
organisms, which slow down with size; their relative metabolism, growth
rates, heart rates, and even rates of innovation - their evolutionary
rates - systematically - and predictably - decrease with organismal
size," West said.
West, 65, is a former Stanford University faculty member and led the
particle theory group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. An active
scientist, he is a Senior Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory and
was appointed President of the Santa Fe Institute in 2005.

Posted by Casey Kazan

Source: santafe.edu
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