Scientists Discover Why Big
Cities Create Innovation & Wealth
Dr.
Geoffrey West, President and Distinguished Professor of the
Santa Fe Institute, recently led a team of scientists from
various institutions that has found the key to understand
and quantify seemingly contradictory features of
urbanization.
(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.)
The
team, including Luis Bettencourt of the Theoretical Division
of Los Alamos National Laboratory, Jose Lobo from the School
of Sustainability of Arizona State University, and Dirk
Helbing and Christian Kuehnert from the Dresden University
of Technology in Germany, detailed their findings in the
article "Growth, innovation, scaling and the pace of life in
cities," in the current issue of the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences. An on-line version of the
article was published on April 16, 2007 (http://www.pnas.org
)
Recognized by the Harvard Business Review
Breakthrough Ideas for 2007, 2/07) and TIME magazine
(2006 100 Most Influential People, 5/06) as a thought
leader, West brought ideas to the group from his
ground-breaking research combining theoretical physics and
biology.
Extending this work into the social realm has long been a
dream for West. Known internationally as a hub for
multidisciplinary research and the study of complex systems,
the Santa Fe Institute is a natural gathering place for
researchers seeking answers to some of the world's most
complex and difficult questions.
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.
These
mathematical relationships deepen our understanding of life
and hold the promise of more such discoveries. Of
particular interest is the finding 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”
behaviour 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!
The
results are particularly relevant at a time where 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,” Bettencourt
said. “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. “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.
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.
The
Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is an acknowledged leader in
multidisciplinary scientific research. Its objectives are to
discover and understand the common fundamental principles in
physical, computational, biological, and social complex
systems that underlie many of the most profound issues
facing science and society today. SFI is an independent
non-profit research and education center supported by
grants, charitable giving, and corporate relationships.
For
more information on the Santa Fe Institute see:
http://www.santafe.edu |