Larger Cities are Smarter

ScienceDaily has a post titled ''Large Is Smart' When It Comes To Cities' that examines some new research which sees larger cities as being the source of the solutions to their problems:

The inexorable trend toward urbanization worldwide presents an urgent challenge for predictive, quantitative theory of urban organization and sustainable development.

This will require thinking about cities in new ways, they add. The old way of thinking about cities is as if they are an organism, which consumes resources and grows in size. Oftentimes, cities are referred to as its own ecosystem and many use the metaphor of it acting like a biological organism, Lobo said. But the team found that this was a false metaphor.

"The one thing that we know about organisms whether it be elephants or sharks or frogs, is that as they get large, they slow down," Lobo said. "They use less energy, they don't move as fast. That is a very important point for biological scaling."

"In the case of cities, it is actually the opposite," he added.

Interesting research here...

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