Luis Bettencourt on the Universal Properties of Self-Organizing Cities

People who live in large cities produce more patents per person than those who live in small towns. They also walk faster down the street, and use less infrastructure per person. Indeed, the relationships between these quantities and city population obey power laws with apparently universal exponents, reminiscent of scaling laws is biological organisms? Luis Bettencourt argues that they can be explained in similar ways, using ideas from complex systems and network theory.

https://preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/07/27/362-luis-bettencourt-on-the-universal-properties-of-self-organizing-cities/