via The Living City, by Jonah Lehrer (full article at SEED Magazine)
A group of scientists and economists got together for an unexpected experiment: to study how cities might work like organisms. Indeed, through all their math and measurements, they found cities act just like creatures.
Cities apparently act decidedly like elephants, because “they get more economical with size.” (They explain that a large animal, like an elephant, consumes much less energy per pound than an animal with smaller mass, like a mouse.) And indeed, a city can double its population without needing to double its consumption of resources (like electricity, for instance). Basically “you need a little bit less of everything per person.”
What this means, according to these physicists, is that what we’ve been traditionally believing is completely backwards. Cities (dirt, pigeons and all) actually hold the key to a more sustainable society. What we need is bigger cities.
And this leads to bursts of creativity and productivity… As cities get bigger, they’ve found that each individual actually gets more productive. Twice the population led to more than twice the creative and economic output. (“A bigger population” they say, “means more economic activity for each person, which encourages more people to move to the city, which results in more economic activity, and so on.”)
Then comes a bit of a hitch…in the words of Bob Dylan: “He not busy being born is busy dying.” At some point, all this continuous growth hits a limit, where the city runs out of resources. The solution to avoid running out of resources? Change something, innovate. And as it turns out, the bigger a city gets, the quicker it has to innovate in order to continue its patterns of growth. In other words, “a city that isn’t innovating is on the verge of collapse.” So, they remind that cities must always support the institutions that end up cultivating innovation.
In a nice twist of fate, big, crowded cities make that innovation possible. They explain that because of their density, “cities concentrate our social interactions.” (In fact, only ants live closer together.) The article brings up Jane Jacobs, who documented in The Death and Life of Great American Cities that “every healthy city was defined by its ability to facilitate social interaction.” She sees the potential in things like short city blocks and mixed-use neighborhoods to encourage “the intricate mingling of diversity.” When strangers were forced to communicate, Jacobs wrote, the city developed the “innate ability… to invent what is required to combat its difficulties.”
The scientists give us a glimpse of what a sustainable future might look like. Today’s opportunity lies in creating and designing for this human interaction — determining ways to cultivate innovation and live our way into this vision.
photo credit: tread
