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 as crime rates. It would be interesting to compare various indicators from the same city to determine if they all follow the pattern or if there are ways to influence the positive effects of urbanization and reduce the impact of negative ones. Full understanding of the urban metabolism may lead to creative ways to alleviate its flaws.
Another powerful conclusion of the research is that
Open-ended wealth and knowledge creation require the pace of life to increase with organization size and for individuals and institutions to adapt at a continually accelerating rate to avoid stagnation or potential crises.
So not only is innovation required to sustain the growth of a city, but it is required at a faster pace as the city grows.
It occurs to me that in the age of open data there must be plenty of sources that could be used to monitor the vital signs of urban life for any given city and create a framework to guide urbanists and politicians on required adjustments to preserve the health of our cities.
[...] of the conclusions of my recent post about urban innovation was that growing cities need to adapt at a faster rate (innovate) as they grow to avoid stagnation. [...]
[...] close relationship between innovation and urban centres is the subject of my previous post urban innovation. In fact, the data strongly suggests that such innovation is a requirement to fuel sustained [...]