UPM-Biofore-Magazine-2-2019

Such is the universality of cities: you get 15% savings on the infra and 15% surplus in innovation and wealth when a city doubles in size.

But now the exponent is larger than one, from 1.15 to 1.2, indicating that you systematically get a 15% increase when a city doubles in size. When people come together, they innovate and create wealth more than their share. Cities are crucibles of civilisation, hotbeds of progress. Faster and faster treadmill Such is the universality of cities: you get 15% savings on the infra and 15% surplus in innovation and wealth when a city doubles in size. This sounds like a good deal. There is a catch, however. Cities are also where socio-economic problems escalate. Scaling with an exponent bigger than one is super-linear, unbounded growth. An exponentially rising growth curve is called a “hockey stick” in economic parlance. It is the proverbial start-up that zooms straight up to the sky and makes bundles of money for everyone. Super-linear growth accelerates until it eventually runs out of resources and collapses. West, the physicist, tells us that this collapse is a mathematical necessity but, luckily for us, not a practical necessity. A collapse can and has been avoided time and time again with innovation. Amajor innovation resets the clock, so to speak. It changes the conditions under which things grow. A continuous cycle of innovation is necessary if we strive for perpetual growth. And as West elaborately explains, the pace of innovation must also accelerate all the time. “We’re not only on a treadmill that’s going faster, but we have to change the treadmill faster and faster,” saidWest in a Ted-talk found on Youtube. This is an idea that connects back to cities. Cities are our best hope Billions have been attracted to cities by all of life’s desirable things – jobs, culture, restaurants, health care, entertainment – forgetting that a lot of undesirables come in the same

rise of humanity but also placed the planet in peril. And cities are already curbing population growth. Examples from the Middle East and Asia tell us that family size drops at least one child per family, on average, when villagers migrate to cities. Cities are being reinvented as political entities. There are those who foresee the next financial crises as bankrupting nations, but poleis will prevail. Cities are resilient. They don’t perish easily. The odds are that you probably live in a city that is much older than the nation you live in. The odds are that the future of democracy will rest in the hands of city states. 

package, ranging from social unrest to fossil fuel-induced global warming. Will humankind be able to innovate itself away from the predicament of global warming? West puts his hope in cities, as does Harvard University economist Ed Glaeser , who writes in Triumph of the City : “Cities are not only mankind’s greatest invention; they are also our best hope for the future.” Energy and materials are saved in cities. This is excellent news for sustainability. Cities bring together innovative people and give birth to companies that come up with new products to replace the fossil raw materials that fuelled the meteoric

A PLANET OF 100 BILLION ELEPHANTS

Humans need about 2,000 calories a day to sustain them­ selves. That is the equivalent of about 90 watts, enough to power a light bulb. Our social metabolic rate, however, is about 11,000 watts or two million calories. That is how much energy is needed to produce and power our cars, mobile phones, houses, refrigerators and all else that we own. We have become a hundred times bigger than when we first evolved as a species. By creating cities and companies, the industrial revolution and all the material wellbeing that came with it, we have gone totally out of whack with everything else on the globe. Now each one of us is equivalent to a 30,000 kg gorilla or 12 elephants, and it is highly questionable if the planet can sustain a hundred billion elephants.

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