(highlight:: Cities and Biological Organisms: Scaling Laws Apply to Both
Key takeaways:
• Cities have underlying scaling laws that allow us to predict many key things about them.
• Scaling laws are not exact because complex systems are continually evolving.
• Despite different histories, cultures, and geographies, cities have an individuality and difference in performance from the predicted scaling laws.
• Scaling laws allow for almost deterministic predictions about things like the length of roads and electrical lines, number of patents, police officers, crimes, and diseases within 80-90% accuracy.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
Again, just to reinforce that go back to the mammals huge diversity of the mammal kingdom, but an underlying set of scaling laws that allows us to predict so many key things about those Organisms. You're saying as you find the same cities, cities that are almost like living things, and it doesn't matter about all the cultural differences we have across the world with the way we Think we want to live our lives compared to how what our cultures what I live their lives, we fundamentally end up with cities that are skilled, self similar versions of one another. Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1
These laws are not sort of like Newton's laws and so they're not exact. And this is the very much characteristics of complex systems and complex adaptive systems, because they're continually evolving and so on. So when you draw that line when I said you plot them on a graph and you see a straight line. Of course, the points are scattered around the straight line. So if you wanted to know how many police you give me the size of a city in the United States. I can tell you the length of all the roads, the length of the electrical lines, the number of patents it produces, the number of the number of police it has, how many AIDS cases there were, How much crime was commanding murders were committed, all to within 1890%. There's almost a deterministic aspect to the city. Despite, as you said, the different histories, the different cultures, the different geographies of each city, there is an individuality to us obviously cities look different. And that difference in terms of the way we've been talking is when you make that plot doesn't like exactly on the straight line. It may over perform in terms of might have less crime, but quote, it should. It might be producing more patents than it should by a small amount to this 80 90% level. We get it right. And that's what the scaling law says colloquial sense.)
- Time 0:12:31
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The Resilience of Cities is Due to the Tight Integration of Its Networks (Social + Infrastucture
Key takeaways:
• Cities consist of both infrastructure and social networks.
• Social networks are crucial for cities to facilitate social interaction and idea creation.
• Dynamic integration between social and infrastructure networks is necessary and challenging to put into mathematics.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
It's complicated for a city because the city contains two kinds of networks, it contains infrastructure networks, namely which are biological like your circulatory system, their Roads and the electrical lines and gas lines and so forth, general transportation networks and so on. More importantly, what a city is, is a bunch of social networks. The city is there because we are all interconnected with each other, whether that's in our homes with our families, whether it's in our jobs in our groups our divisions, and so on. And so the idea is, it is the social networks integrated and intention with the infrastructure networks. Now I want to say one word about those social networks, which is very different than all the networks we've discussed, because the fascinating thing about social networks is that when You bring people together and that's the whole point of a city is to bring people together and facilitate social interaction. A talks to be B talks to see C talkbacks to A, and you build on each other, and you are continually creating ideas. And that's what a city is it is that machine to facilitate that process, and the difficulty in putting this into mathematics, it has to be in dynamic integration with the social networks Because even though you have this image of people interacting and so forth, you have to be some place, you have to be in your home, you have to be in your kitchen, you have to be in the bathroom, You have to be in your office, you have to be some place which ties you to the infrastructure network, not only that you have to be moving. You have to go to the office, you have to take the kids to school, you have to go get food from the store. So these two networks are intimately integrated in intertwined. And this is no accident that the point eight five is point one five less than one, and the one point one five is point one five bigger than one. It actually comes about because those two have to be integrated.)
- Time 0:15:21
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