Better technology has turned cities into fountains of data that confirm known regularities and reveal striking new patterns, according to a feature in The Economist that cites SFI's cities and urbanization research.

Read the article (June 23, 2012)

"Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt, both of the Santa Fe Institute, found that cities scale much like organisms. Just as an elephant is, roughly speaking, a larger but more energy-efficient version of a gorilla, big cities are thrifty versions of small ones.

"For a metropolis twice the size of another, the length of electric cables, number of gas stations and other bits of infrastructure decrease by about 15% per inhabitant. But beasts do not enjoy the cities’ rising returns to scale. Income, patents, savings and other signs of wealth rise by around 15% when a city’s size doubles. In short, urbanites consume less but produce more.

"Some academics ... see a real prospect of synthesising these patterns and regularities into a “science of the city”, much like physics or biology. That will be the subject of a conference at the Santa Fe Institute in July.

Read the article (June 23, 2012)

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