Growth, Innovation, and the Pace of Life in Cities (469)

Podcast: What is The Future for Cities? · Fanni Melles

Opublikowano: 2026-10-05

A research debate on the 2007 paper Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities, by Luís M. A. Bettencourt, José Lobo, Dirk Helbing, Christian Kühnert, and Geoffrey B. West. When a city doubles in population, wealth and invention grow by more than double. Biology does the opposite: a larger animal uses energy more efficiently and lives more slowly. The paper's growth equations say a superlinear city has to produce major innovations at a continually faster rate, or growth stalls and can collapse. One reading treats the city as an engine that makes solutions fas...