The Rockefeller Foundation has awarded an SFI research team a $231,400 grant to develop their studies of the quantitative properties and behavior of cities and companies.
The work builds on earlier research by SFI External Professor Luis Bettencourt and his colleagues that found that cities change in predictable ways as they get larger. Per capita figures for infrastructure, such as miles of roads and electrical cable, decrease as cities get larger, for example, whereas figures related to social productivity, such as income, patents, and crime, increase with city size.
A team led by SFI Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West is continuing the Institute’s efforts to describe and explain these scaling patterns, investigating why some cities outperform others of the same size, and extending their studies to companies – which, as the researchers are beginning to show, also have properties that scale predictably as companies grow.
West hopes the work will lead to a conceptual umbrella for a wide range of research into institutions past and present, from hunter-gatherer groups and ancient cities to high-tech companies and online societies. The work also might suggest policies to make institutions and communities more robust and sustainable in the face of climate change, population growth, and similar challenges.
As a first step towards such a project, the Institute held a meeting at Bellagio, Italy, in July to bring together researchers from a number of fields who are working on various aspects of urban life.
More information:
Alliance magazine interview with Geoffrey West
http://www.alliancemagazine.org/en/content/interview-geoffrey-west