However, when you compare companies with cities, companies have similar metabolic efficiencies of scale as they grow, but their innovation rate, instead of increasing with size, They create most of civilization’s problems, but they are capable of solving problems even faster than they create them. Once again there is power-law scaling if you count patents, wages, tax receipts, crimes, restaurants, even the pace of walking, but instead of slowing down with increasing size, cities speed up with increasing size.Įach time they increase in size, they are 15% more innovative socio-economically at the same time they are 15% more efficient in terms of energy and materials.įurthermore, they apparently live forever.

In physical terms, cities are like organisms, enjoying sublinear economies of scale with each increase in size.īut when you look at cities in terms of their social-economic networks, an astonishing finding emerges. Shrews weigh 2 grams, and in their 14-month life their heart beats a billion times.īlue whales weigh 200 million grams, and in their 100-year life, their heart beats the same billion times.ĭitto for all mammals (except humans, who have achieved a lifetime average of 2 billion heartbeats, presumably for cultural reasons.) The bigger the animal, the slower and more efficient its metabolism is, at a rate lower than 1-to-1 (“sublinear” in West’s terminology). The same dynamics of networks explain how what is called “power-law scaling“ works in biology. “That‘s why New York is the greenest city in America,” West said. In other words, with every size increase there is a 15% improvement in energy efficiency. increase at a rate a little less than double. With each doubling of a city’s size, the numbers of gas stations and power lines and water lines, etc. One reason for constant urban growth is that the bigger the city, the more efficient it is, because of economies of scale. Global urbanization has reached the point that there are a million new people arriving in cities every week, and that rate is expected to continue to midcentury. “We live,” he said, “in an exponentially expanding socio-economic universe.” West focussed on cities in his discussion of the newly discovered exponential scaling laws that govern everything alive.

Scale by Geoffrey B. West