Cities Are the Solution

This morning I've been reading an advance copy of Jeff Brugmann's new book, Welcome to the Urban Revolution: How Cities Are Changing the World, along with the new issue of Seed magazine. 

Both make the obvious (but much ignored) point that cities are bastions of efficiency, thanks to their density.  As Jeff puts it (in what is a terrific book), cities also have the advantage of sheer volume of any particular opportunity (economies of scale), the advantage of collaborative efficiency as people with different interests, expertise and objectives can easily find each other (economics of association), and the advantage of being able to extend their organized strategies to other cities through infrastructure (economies of extension).

Quoting Geoffrey West's work at the Santa Fe Institute, Seed reports (again) that "As cities expand in size, they need relatively fewer things like roads, pipelines, power grids and water facilities."  But when it comes to social phenomena -- "to things related to capital and innovation -- just the opposite is true."  Instead of needing less, we get more.  "When cities grow... each additional person adds not only his or her individual productivity to the city's total, but also creates new connections to other members of the city, thereby increasing their productivity."

"In other words, what matters is not that cities aggregate people, it's that these people interact with one another, producing novel forms of behavior -- the signature of a complex system."

At a time when the world is looking for efficiencies and depending on new ideas to get us through this crisis, investing in cities makes more sense than ever.

  

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