Humanity’s greatest social innovation remains the city, says an article in the October 2011 issue of The Atlantic mentioning SFI research that finds surprising statistical regularities among cities, patterns the researchers relate to an underlying "urban metabolism."
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As our cities grow larger, the article says, the synapses that connect them -- people with exceptional social skills -- are becoming ever more essential to economic growth.
"Researchers affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute have identified the mechanism that underpins city growth and development as an accelerated rate of 'urban metabolism.' Unlike biological species, whose metabolism slows as they get bigger, successful cities exhibit faster metabolism as they grow -- a phenomenon that the researchers dubbed “superlinear” scaling."
Read The Atlantic article (September 13, 2011)