## Metadata - Author: [[Geoffrey West]] - Full Title: Scale - Category: #books ## Highlights - Cities and the process of urbanization may be just “too complex” to be subjected to laws and rules that transcend their individuality in a useful way. Science at its best is the search for commonalities, regularities, principles, and universalities that transcend and underlie the structure and behavior of any particular individual constituent, whether it be a quark, a galaxy, an electron, a cell, an airplane, a computer, a person, or a city. And it is at its very best when it can do that in a quantitative, mathematically computational, predictive framework, as is the case for electrons, airplanes, and computers, for instance. However, there are many big challenges such as consciousness, the origins of life, the origins of the universe, and indeed cities themselves that potentially cannot be fully addressed in this way, and we have to recognize and be satisfied with limits to our knowledge and understanding. But it is nevertheless incumbent upon us to push the scientific paradigm as far as possible to determine where the boundaries are and not be deterred by the specter of overwhelming complexity and diversity. ([Location 4636](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KGZVYDK&location=4636)) - cities are an emergent self-organizing phenomenon that has resulted from the interaction and communication between human beings exchanging energy, resources, and information. ([Location 4791](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KGZVYDK&location=4791)) - Fractals are often the result of an evolutionary process that tends toward optimizing specific features, such as ensuring that all cells in an organism or all people in a city are supplied by energy and information, or maximizing efficiency by minimizing transportation times or times for accomplishing tasks with minimal energy. Less obvious is what is being optimized in social networks. There is, for instance, no satisfactory explanation based on underlying principles for understanding the hierarchical structure observed by Dunbar, or for the origin of his sequence of numbers. Even if the social brain hypothesis is correct, it doesn’t explain either the origin of the fractal nature of social groups or where the number 150 comes from. ([Location 5391](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KGZVYDK&location=5391)) - The multiplicative compounding of socioeconomic interactivity engendered by urbanization has inevitably led to the contraction of time. Rather than being bored to death, our actual challenge is to avoid anxiety attacks, psychotic breakdowns, heart attacks, and strokes resulting from being accelerated to death. ([Location 5667](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KGZVYDK&location=5667)) - There are now more cell phones in use than people on the planet. In the United States alone there are more than a trillion phone calls made each year, and on average a typical person spends more than three hours a day fixated by his or her cell phone. Almost twice as many people have access to cell phones in the world as they do to toilets—an interesting comment on our priorities. ([Location 5755](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KGZVYDK&location=5755)) - aspires to be a sort of TED-like affair, though it’s narrower in scope with more emphasis on art and design. Like TED and the Davos meeting of the World Economic Forum, it’s basically a several-day networking cocktail party with a dense program of talks in an ambience of “this is where it’s at,” trying to project an image of futuristic culture, high-tech commerce, and “innovation.” An eclectic mix of interesting and even influential people are in attendance, and there are occasional glimpses of substance and brilliant insight in the presentations, though these are modulated with a heavy dose of flaky, somewhat superficial bullshit wrapped up in superb PowerPoint presentations. This is the way of the world, and there are now many such high-profile events just like these. Despite their shortcomings they do serve an important purpose of creating cross-currents ([Location 5811](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KGZVYDK&location=5811)) - As explained in earlier chapters, scaling laws are a consequence of the optimization of the network structures that sustain these various systems resulting from the continuous feedback mechanisms inherent in natural selection and the “survival of the fittest.” In the case of cities, we would therefore expect the emergent scaling laws to exhibit much greater variance around idealized power laws than organisms do, because the time over which evolutionary forces have acted is so much shorter. Comparing fits to scaling in the two cases, such as Figure 1 for animal metabolic rates versus Figure 3 for the patent production in cities, confirms this prediction: there is a consistently larger spread around the fits for cities than for organisms. Extrapolating this to companies where “evolutionary” timescales are even shorter suggests that if they do indeed scale, there should be an even greater spread in the data around idealized scaling curves than for cities and organisms. ([Location 6518](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KGZVYDK&location=6518)) - As we’ve seen, growth in both organisms and cities is fueled by the difference between metabolism and maintenance. Using that language, the total income (or sales) of a company can be thought of as its “metabolism” while expenses can be thought of as its “maintenance” costs. In biology, metabolic rate scales sublinearly with size, so as organisms increase in size the supply of energy cannot keep up with the maintenance demands of cells, leading to the eventual cessation of growth. On the other hand, the social metabolic rate in cities scales superlinearly, so as cities grow the creation of social capital increasingly outpaces the demands of maintenance, leading to faster and faster open-ended growth. ([Location 6594](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KGZVYDK&location=6594))