UPM-Biofore-Magazine-2-2019

ACCORDING TO PHYSICIST Geoffrey West, a city plays the role of a great big magnet. Cities are a physical manifestation of our interactions and the grouping of individuals.

Surely, thought West, a deep understanding of the dynamics of urbanisation is required if billions are to live in harmony with the biosphere and continue enjoying the standard of living we have already achieved in the West. He set about sketching a scientific theory of cities (scientific in the sense of universal and predictive mathematics), a physics of social life to serve as a tool for coping with rampant urbanisation. The simple universality of life A native of the United Kingdom, Geoffrey West , 79, spent the best part of his career working in the Los Alamos National Laboratory on quarks, string theory and other aspects of reality comprehensible only to those trained in theoretical physics. Then, in the early 1990s, he became involved with the Santa Fe Institute. Founded in 1984, the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) was the first research institute dedicated to the study of complex adaptive systems. Located in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, NewMexico, the SFI is famous for its highly exploratory approach and large visiting and interdisciplinary faculty. West began collaborating with biologists on power laws in the footsteps of Max Kleibers, who in the 1930s observed that metabolic rates scale to the¾power of mass. This means that if you double the size of an animal, only 75%more energy is needed for the animal to sustain itself. Similar scaling is ubiquitous in biology. From a tiny shrew to a human to a blue whale, mammals are in every way scaled versions of each other, with quantifiable and predictable regularities. Despite all the quirks of Darwinian evolution and natural selection, there is a simple universality to life. But is this true of social life, West asked himself. Social life is after all based on networks every bit as much as nature. Could the same kind of scaling be found in cities and companies? Are

metaphors such as “DNA of a company” or “metabolism of a city” justified? Is London just a scaled-up Helsinki? It turns out that it is – and not only materially, but socioeconomically, too. That is the gist of West’s bestseller Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies . Less infra, more innovation Natural growth is sublinear or bounded, and often referred to as economics of scale. Natural growth is explained by the generic physical properties of the networks life depends on, from the intracellular to the multicellular throughout the ecosystem. Cities are networks, too, in other words they are physical manifestations of the clustering of people and material. West and his collaborators discovered that infrastructure scales sublinearly just like biology. If you double the population of a city, you need 85%more infrastructure. You save 15%. The same ratio applies whether

A continuous cycle of innovation is necessary if we strive for perpetual growth. And the pace of innovation must also accelerate all the time.

you look at the length of roads, rails or electrical lines or the number of petrol stations. What is more, the same economy of scale is at work fromGermany to Japan to Argentina to China, regardless of all the contingencies of history and urban planning. The real surprise, however, was that socioeconomic variables also scale despite their having no analogy in the natural world. The SFI has researched every socio-economic variable imaginable and they all scale, from wages, wealth and AIDS incidence to the size of the police force.

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