Prof Geoffrey West (Santa Fe Institute): Is a Quantitative, Predictive, Science of Cities, Urbanisation and Global Sustainability Conceivable? What Can We Learn from Biology and Physics?
Cities and global urbanisation have emerged as the source of the greatest challenges the planet has faced since humans became social. Cities are simultaneously the hubs of innovation, the engines of wealth creation and centers of power, but are also the prime source of crime, pollution, disease, global warming and the consumption of energy and resources. Despite this dual role and the threat to global sustainability, there is as yet no integrated, quantitative, predictive, mechanistic framework for understanding their dynamics, growth and organization. I will discuss some ideas for developing such a theory, inspired by a conceptual framework for quantitatively understanding various universal properties of biological organisms (including growth, metabolic rates, cancer, sleep, aging, death, vasculature, and ecosystems). It is motivated by the observation that, despite the extraordinary complexity and diversity of cities, almost all of their measurable characteristics, such as wages, patents, assets, crime, police, disease, pollution, and roads, scale with size in a systematic, almost “universal”, fashion much like biological organisms suggesting that generic underlying mathematisable principles are at play. These have dramatic implications for growth, development and global sustainability: left unchecked, innovation and wealth creation that fuel socio-economic systems potentially sow the seeds for their inevitable collapse.