Mitchell: We're now in the Pod A Conference Room

and we're going to be visiting a meeting of the city's Scaling and Sustainability Group.

And I think they're going to introduce themselves first.

Bettencourt: Good morning. I'm Luis Bettencourt. I'm a professor here at the Institute.

And so we have this very vital and interesting group on cities.

We work in cities worldwide and particularly this group, today,

will talk about development in cities of Africa.

I also work on many other problems to do with science and technology;

to do with... what is the brain in terms of what kind of system it is,

as an information processing device; how we learn,

and several other themes in complex systems. I hope you enjoy, too.

Andris: Hi. I'm Clio Andris. I've been a postdoc here at the Santa Fe Institute

for about seven months now.

And my background is in Geographic Information Systems.

And with Luis I've been working on issues of migration between major cities in the U.S.

And we found some interesting regularities there.

And more recently, I've been working with cell phone data from Cote d'Ivoire

and we found some interesting connections between urban and rural areas there.

Frazier: Tyler Frazier. I'm a postdoctoral fellow here at the Santa Fe Institute

working on the Shack Dwellers International project

focusing on issues related to urban development in the developing world,

with a lot of interest in Africa; particularly in sub-Saharan Africa,

West Africa, and East Africa.

Hand: Hi. I'm Joe Hand, I'm a project manager for the informal settlements project with Tyler.

I'll be looking at the data technologies and implementation of... data collection during the project

and helping Tyler with any work he needs done.

Andris: OK, so Luis and I stumbled upon a very interesting Data for Development Challenge

that was sponsored by Orange, who are based in France.

And Orange... are one of the major cell providers in Cote d'Ivoire,

which is also a French-speaking nation.

And so they were able to release datasets for us to look at.

And we wrote a little abstract and we got the datasets back.

And there's four major datasets.

So one was on temporal mobility, just looking at where people go on the streets;

like, every minute, where people's cell phones were going.

Another was that same type of thing over a five-month period.

Another was just a social network;

so just looking at which phone number called which phone number, without any geographic location.

And of course the phone numbers are anonymized so you don't know who they are.

And then the fourth dataset, which is the one that we use,

was looking at the flow from cell tower to cell tower.

And there were about 1,200 cell towers that we used.

Most of them were in the main city, Abidjan,

which holds the vast majority of the population of Ivory Coast.

So our goal was to take a look at what kind of places

were talking with what kind of places most often.

And this is the number of calls placed per capita, here.

So we can see that from Abidjan here,

there's a lot of calls going back and forth, and going into Abidjan.

And these loops here signify how many calls per capita are going back into their area.

So for instance, in Abidjan,

about 84 percent of calls that are placed also end up in Abidjan, too.

So it just shows how cohesive their local economy is.

And then over here we have San Pedro,

which is kind of a port city even though it doesn't look like it, right here.

And this is also a kind of an economic area that's getting a little better.

The capital, Yamoussoukro, is here and has strong ties to Abidjan.

And then Bouake, which is kind of the unofficial northern capital,

has been through a lot of political turmoil recently with the northern Muslim population,

and they've had a civil war going on in the past ten years or so.

Frazier: Okay, so here's a map of Ghana.

And along our western border is the shared border with Cote d'Ivoire.

And then to the north is Burkina Faso... Abidjan is over here...

definitely there's a lot of connectivity between Abidjan and Accra.

Benin City and Lagos is over here,

so in general the entire Gulf of Guinea and West African coast is kind of an urban sprawling;

it's almost turning into one big city along the entire coast.

In here, in Ghana, we have Accra down in this area.

And then moving more to the north you have Kumasi,

which is the capital of the Ashanti Kingdom,

which is the historical, cultural, and political center of West Africa.

So that gives us a little bit of a sense of Ghana and density.

So to give you an idea of the political subdivisions and personal property

for Accra and for Ghana and the... entire region.

So here we have the same map illustrating the densities in terms of population density,

persons per acre I think, actually I think it was acre, we're looking at acres here.

And so where there are higher hues of red it's "hotter",

it's more dense, there are more people there.

And then where it's more yellow, then of course it's more agricultural, more rural.

Here's Tamale, Tamale is actually a northern city.

Similar to Cote d'Ivoire, it's also 80 to 90 percent Muslim.

Djibo connections, which connects more to the Niger River Delta which is up here,

then when you get down into the south we're in Accra and Kumasi,

which is 80, 90, actually more than 90 percent Christian, Catholic-Protestant.

So there's a real distinct difference in terms of cultural history or pack dependence,

or whatever, in terms of the North and South.

Bettencourt: There's also an economic divide, right?

The South traditionally has cocoa, has the cities;

or at least now it certainly has larger cities and people are migrating there.

And the North is poorer, right? It's a different kind of agriculture...

Frazier: Much poorer. Exactly. This is more subsistence and tomatoes and things like this...

Okay, so we're looking here at this man-made lake, the Volta River,

and the aluminum smelter... it's a large source of electricity for exporting aluminum.

And the Valco Company, which is an American company... is located here.

And so that's also a big economic engine for Ghana,

has been for since the 50s and 60s, a long, long time.