Physicist, Geoffrey West, wants to find a way to model how city growth affect society and environment

One of my favorite urban thinkers, Geoffrey West, is trying to now find a way to model the effects of city growth on society and environment.

I have loved his previous work that examined the metabolic rate of cities where he compared cities to elephants. The main take-away from this research for me was that cities are more sustainable and scalable than smaller scale human settlements precisely because cities are better at conversing energy for  large populations. Andrew Laiton wrote a lovely recent post on metabolic urban growth.

All this cool sciencey ways of looking at cities as biological creatures is awesome! But from a sociological point of view I think that it can mislead policy policymakers to creating overly simplistic solutions for much more complex issues. If we look to the urban policies post-Chicago School a la The Ecological Model in the early 20th century - we see the disastrous effects of what happened when policy makers treated cities as biological creatures. They convinced the US government that cities were not good for community cohesion. Now unlike Park, Burgess and others from The Chicago School, West has not repeated their mistake by taking an role in urban policy making.

But the problem is that now sociologists will often decry any studies that speak of cities as biological creatures or systems as problematic because these qualitative-science driven studies forget the social - the people - the interactions. I have to agree that the overlap between policy making at the city level and the science of cities is fuzzy but it should not be a reason for scientists to NOT make comparisons between cities and nature. I think it’s just serve as another reason for more dialogue between urban scientists, urban planners & policymakers, and urban sociologists. And urban sociologists should remember that The Ecological School from Chicago created more inner-city problems in the US than physicists with an interest in cities so far.

Regardless of the wall mainstream urban sociology has put up around their work, I love exploring research like West’s  because it’s just so refreshing to view the city from a new paradigm. I don’t think it’s that scary to venture into new theoretical fields! :)

Now West has turned his interests in how cities scale to asking “to what extent can biology and social organization (which are both quintessential complex adaptive systems) be put in a more quantitative, analytic, mathemitizable, predictive framework so that we can understand them in the way that we understand ‘simple physical systems’?’

West describes his project below on The Edge:

The great thing about cities, the thing that is amazing about cities is as they grow, so to speak, their dimensionality increases. That is, the space of opportunity, the space of functions, the space of jobs just continually increases. And the data shows that. If you look at job categories, it continually increases. I’ll use the word “dimensionality.”  It opens up. And in fact, one of the great things about cities is that it supports crazy people. You walk down Fifth Avenue, you see crazy people. There are always crazy people. Well, that’s good. Cities are tolerant of extraordinary diversity. …

This is in complete contrast to companies. The Google boys in the back garage so to speak with ideas of the search engine, were no doubt promoting all kinds of crazy ideas and maybe having even crazy people around them.

Well, Google is a bit of an exception, because it still tolerates some of that. But most companies start out probably with some of that buzz. But the data indicates that at about 50 employees to a hundred that buzz starts to stop. A company that was more multi dimensional, more evolved, becomes uni dimensional. It closes down.

Indeed, if you go to General Motors or you go to American Airlines or you go to Goldman Sachs, you don’t see crazy people. Crazy people are fired. Well, to speak of crazy people, is taking the extreme. But maverick people are often fired.

It’s not surprising to learn that when manufacturing companies are on a down turn, they decrease research and development, and in fact in some cases, do actually get rid of it, thinking this is “oh, we can get that back in two years we’ll be back on track.”

Well, this kind of thinking kills them. This is part of the killing, and this is part of the change from superlinear to sublinear, namely companies allow themselves to be dominated by bureaucracy and administration over creativity and innovation, and unfortunately, it’s necessary. You cannot run a company without administrative. Someone has got to take care of the taxes and the bills and the cleaning the floors and the maintenance of the building and all the rest of that stuff. You need it. And the question is, “can you do it without it dominating the company?” The data suggests that you can’t.

The question is, as a scientist, can we take these ideas and do what we did in biology, at least based on networks and other ideas, and put this into a quantitative, mathematizable, predictive theory, so that we can understand the birth and death of companies, how that stimulates the economy?  How it’s related to cities? How does it affect global sustainability and have a predictive framework for an idealized system, so that we can understand how to deal with it and avoid it? If you’re running a bigger company, you can recognize what the metrics are that are driving you to mortality, and possibly put it off, and hopefully even avoid it. 

Otherwise we have a theory that tells you when Google and Microsoft will eventually die, and die might mean a merger with someone else. -West on The Edge

I’m sure his experiments are going to produce some lovely images and fruitful dialogues! I can’t wait to to see what comes out of this.