The planet is now dominated by cities.
And it is becoming very clear that the future
of humanity--global sustainability
itself--is now dependent on us having
an understanding, a deep understanding,
of cities and urbanization.
You now have the greatest migration in
history where billions of people are
choosing to come to cities; to change
their lives radically from what it
traditionally was.
Look, historically, the hallmark of
any civilization is cities. In fact, some
anthropologists and archeologists
have even said that cities (and
I agree with them) cities are actually
one of our main inventions.
The fact that China and India are
building hundreds of new cities, and this
is going to have an enormous impact.
They are sort of the fastest, most
spectacular social phenomenon that ever
happened to our species and, perhaps, to
biology on Earth.
There's lots of research done on cities.
There's lots of economists who study cities
and sociologists and anthropologists, and
even psychologists; and the work that we
are involved in is bringing a predictive
mathemetizable framework to that, to
complement the traditional narrative form
more associated with the social sciences,
and trying to understand what is
systematic of cities, so we can predict
behavior, and have an impact on problem-
solving.
I think Jane Jacobs once said that one of
the hardest problems about understanding
cities is that they deal with dozens of
quantities; they all intertwine. So a city
is not just its economy, it's not factoring
it's just producing something from inputs,
it's not just a set of people interacting
with each other without structure or
context or economics; and it's not just
an infrastucture, either.
And cities, we recognize now, are the
origin of what we perceive to be problems.
Global climate warming, our environment,
problems with the economy, problems with
disease, with pollution. However, cities
are also the origin of the solution. They are
the places where ideas are created, they are
vacuum cleaners that suck up creativity and
Innovation. People are attracted to cities by the
buzz of cities. So, we need to understand
how these two things integrate.
If I can give you the recipe to have a
wealthy, innovative city, why is it so
hard to recreate that recipe? What is
really going on in San Jose? I can tell
you San Jose is very inventive; it's very
creative; but what is it about that
place?
One of the metaphors that has been used
consistently for cities is to compare them
to organisms. One often hears phrases like
"the metabolism of the city," or "the DNA
or the marketplace," or even the ecology
of the urban system. So, one of the
questions, obviously, that arises, is
"is that just metaphor, or is there
something serious and substantive in it?"
So scaling is to look at how the
properties of a system vary with its size.
In Biology, we see that the bigger you are
the less you need per capita; the less
energy you need per capita, et cetera.
So there is an economy of scale.
Associated with that is the slowing of
the pace of life. You live longer, things
diffuse slower, hearts beat slower, etc.
In cities, we see the opposite behavior.
As cities get larger, what you see is a
systematic increase in socio-economic
products. So you find that wealth creation
gets faster, innovation gets faster.
So all of the things associated with
social interaction increase in the same
way, and that increase can be expressed
very simply, and that is: If you double
the size of a city, you get approximately
a 15% increase in wages, wealth,
innovation, and also the negative effects
of living in a city...
So in this sense you can see what a city
is. The city is a concentration of people,
with the infrastructure that allows you
to basically concentrate interactions
effectively--in terms of number of
interactions per unit time--shrink time
and shrink space, so that you create,
essentially, a social accelerator, a
social concentrator of human activity.
So in Biology a network is, your
cardiovascular system, your respiratory
system, your renal system; whereas, in
cities, it's the roads, the electrical
lines, the gas lines, but it is also the
social networks of interaction between
people, and between groups of people.
We believe that the reason we see these
extraordinarily systematic behaviors in
both biology and in social organizationsms
- cities - is because of the constraints
of networks.
But there are specific ways in which cities
can deviate from these averages, as well;
in terms, for example, of how well they do
economically. These have a lot to do with
their history and some of the self-
reinforcing cycles...
The various historical events that took
place; the multiple commissions of urban
designers and architects; the role of the
various mayors; the fact that the railroad
may have suddenly come through.
So I think now that we have an
increasingly clear picture about what
cities look like quantitatively - in terms
of their statistics in terms of how much
they can vary from this idealized generic
city - I think what's missing now is to
have a mathematical description that's
predictive of what creates these patterns
that we see in the data.
The science of cities means that, in
addition to just qualitative understanding
of a city, that the structure, dynamics,
organization, evolution, growth, can all
be put in a mathematizable way,
quantitatively, and therefore
predictively.
So the only way to understand all this
together is to understand how these
different aspects of the city condition
each other and constrain each other to
create sort of this magical dynamics
in organization that is organization.
I would say that if you care about the
history of humanity, if you care about
economic growth, if you care about
innovation, you have to think about
cities.