Dresden 2009 – scientific programme

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AGSOE: Arbeitsgruppe Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

AGSOE 7: Traffic Dynamics, Urban and Regional Systems I

AGSOE 7.1: Invited Talk

Tuesday, March 24, 2009, 09:30–10:15, BAR 205

Growth, Innovation, Scaling, and the Pace of Life in Cities — •Luis Bettencourt — Theoretical Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos NM 87545 — Santa Fe Institute, 1299 Hyde Park Rd, Santa Fe NM 87501

Humanity has just crossed a major landmark in its history with the majority of people now living in cities. The inexorable trend towards urbanization worldwide presents an urgent challenge for developing a predictive, quantitative theory of urban organization and sustainable development. We present empirical evidence indicating that the processes relating urbanization to economic development and knowledge creation are very general, being shared by all cities belonging to the same urban system and sustained across different nations and times.

Many diverse properties of cities from patent production and personal income to electrical cable length are shown to be power-law functions of population size with scaling exponents greater than unity (increasing returns) for quantities reflecting socio-economic processes (wealth creation, innovation, crime). Quantities accounting for infrastructure on the other hand are characterized by exponents smaller than one (economies of scale).

We explore the consequences of these relations for the pace of urban life and for the long term growth dynamics of urban agglomerations. We also show how the statistical properties of residuals from scaling fits lead to a new ranking of cities within an urban system that is population size independent and to simpler, more fundamental, models of urban systems.