"He not busy being born is busy dying"

Via CEOs for Cities
Excerpts from:
The Living City
August 2007 -- By Jonah Lehrer, Seed Magazine

Cities act just like creatures. They obey the same metabolic laws that govern every organism. Which means that cities, just like elephants, get more economical with size.

It turns out that every city is simply a scaled version of the same city. A city can double its population without doubling its resource consumption.

President of Santa Fe Institute Geoffrey West told (the terrific science and culture magazine) Seed, "One of the basic principles of cities is that it's more efficient to bring people together. You need a little bit less of everything per person. It's the exact same way in biology."

While most of us imagine idyllic rural America as the epitome of sustainable living, conventional wisdom is exactly backward. "Cities are bastions of environmentalism," according to West and his collaborator Luis Bettencourt. "People who live in densely populated places lead environmentally friendly lives. They consume fewer resources per person and take up less space. And because efficiency scales with the size of the population, big cities are always more efficient than small cities."

Bottom line: The secret to creating a more environmentally sustainable society is making our big cities bigger. We need more metropolises.

The researchers also found that as cities got bigger, each individual got more productive. "A doubling of population led to a more than doubling of creative and economic output. A bigger population means more economic activity for each person, which encourages more people to move to the city, which results in more economic activity, and so on."

Every city runs out of resources. But that's where innovation comes into play. West told Seed, "The only way to avoid stagnation from a shortage of resources is to change something.... There's the invention of the steam engine, the car, the digital revolution... A city that isn't innovating is on the verge of collapse."

Turns out that innovation returns smaller dividends per person as the population expands. That's why the bigger the city, the faster it must innovate in order to continue its patterns of growth.

Although cities are the driving force behind accelerating innovation cycles, cities cannot take innovation for granted. West warns cities and corporations not to cut money for research and development, especially in tough times. It only reduces your ability to innovate when you need it most.

Innovation in cities is rooted in human interaction and lots of it. "Cities concentrate our social interactions and that's what leads to this explosion of knowledge creation and innovation." So West's team plans to study urban form to figure out how the social interactions of urban streets translate into new kinds of knowledge. And I can't wait to see the results.