When I posted the living city back in January I had only read a journalistic interpretation from the original research. Thanks to Allison Pinto for pointing me to the original paper: Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities. While the notion of cities having a certain metabolism resembling that of living organisms is a key aspect, there are other important elements of the research that deserve further discussion:
When it comes to infrastructure, cities tend to follow a similar metabolic rate of biological organisms (power law scaling ~0.8). This is in fact the only area where a commonality with living organisms can be found.
But for many of the processes taking place within a city, the scaling follows the law of increasing returns, something unheard of in the living world. And this is true for many processes that would not be related to each other in any way. They are processes that speak of the social nature of cities.
These findings about how processes follow a certain scaling are not limited to positive indicators of urbanization: innovation, growth of domestic product, wages, but also to negative ones such [...]
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