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The scale of nuclear energy is about a million times larger than that of chemical electromagnetic energy that is released in the burning of fossil fuels:
the same amount of matter can produce approximately a million times more energy from the nuclei of its atoms than from its molecules.
Unfortunately, using nuclear fusion to generate economically competitive energy has proven to be quite elusive and technologically extremely challenging despite vigorous international efforts to make it viable.
Instead, nuclear power has been successfully developed using nuclear fission in which energy is released when heavy nuclei (of uranium) dissociate into lighter products, a process analogous to conventional chemical production of energy from fossil fuels.
Like conventional fossil fuel power plants, energy produced by nuclear reactors is internal to the entire global system and consequently suffers from similar issues regarding the production of entropy and deleterious by-products.
it is both natural and compelling to investigate the possibility of extending the same sort of analyses used for understanding biological network systems to social organizations,”
are the relevant constraints all physical, or might there also be social and cognitive constraints that must be taken into account?”
Cities are sustained by similar network systems such as roads, railways, and electrical lines that transport people, energy, and resources and whose flow is therefore a manifestation of the metabolism of the city.
cities are emergent complex adaptive social network systems resulting from the continuous interactions among their inhabitants, enhanced and facilitated by the feedback mechanisms provided by urban life.
Jane Jacobs. Her defining book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, had an enormous influence across the globe on how we think about cities and how we approach “urban planning.”
As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planner in charge.
Sir Ebenezer Howard, the inventor of the concept of the “garden city.”
This move away from organic geometry became the signature of modernist movements in both architecture and urban planning during the twentieth century.
A major piece of Moses’s vision was to construct the Lower Manhattan Expressway designed to go directly through Greenwich Village, Washington Square, and SoHo.
A major point throughout her writing is that macroeconomically, cities are the prime drivers of economic development, not the nation-state as is typically presumed by most classical economists.
many of us who have come to study cities from a variety of perspectives have arrived at some version of her conclusions.
The truth is that council housing is a living tomb. You dare not give the house up because you might never get another, but staying is to be trapped in a ghetto of both place and mind.
almost all planned cities end up being soulless and alienating, lacking a buzz of popular and cultural activities and with a general dearth of community spirit.
Cities evolve and eventually develop a soul, though it might take a long time.
To accommodate the continued exponential increase, new cities and urban developments are being built at a truly astonishing rate.
It is in this dual spirit of the urgent need for a theory to help address the practical existential questions of long-term global sustainability and the desire to understand an extraordinary fundamental phenomenon of nature for its own sake that the research program on cities and companies was initiated at the Santa Fe Institute.
the Living Earth Simulator. This is designed to model global-scale systems from economies, governments, and cultural trends to epidemics, agriculture, and technological developments using big data sets and fancy algorithms.
there is an extraordinary regularity in how the number of gas stations varies across different cities.
What is even more surprising is that other infrastructural quantities associated with transport and supply networks, such as the total length of electrical lines, roads, water and gas lines, all scale in much the same way with approximately the same value of the exponent, namely about 0.85.
Thus a city of 10 million people typically needs 15 percent less of the same infrastructure compared with two cities of 5 million each, leading to significant savings in materials and energy use.3
on average the bigger the city, the greener it is and the smaller its per capita carbon footprint.
socioeconomic quantities with no analog in biology such as average wages, the number of professional people, the number of patents produced, the amount of crime, the number of restaurants, and the gross urban domestic product (GDP) also scale in a surprisingly regular and systematic fashion,
Thus the larger the city the more innovative “social capital” is created, and consequently, the more the average citizen owns, produces, and consumes, whether it’s goods, resources, or ideas.
person may move to a bigger city drawn by more innovation, more opportunity, better wages, and a greater sense of “action,” but she can also expect to confront an equivalent increase in garbage, theft, stomach flu, and AIDS.
Another important point to recognize is that the observed scaling laws are between cities within the same national urban system, meaning within the same country.
The overall scale of the various metrics, such as wages, crime, patent production, and total road lengths, depends on the overall economy, culture, and individuality of each national urban system.
cities are an emergent self-organizing phenomenon that has resulted from the interaction and communication between human beings exchanging energy, resources, and information.
it’s worth noting that not all characteristics of cities scale nonlinearly. For example, each person on average has a single home and a single job regardless of city size, so that the number of jobs and number of houses increase linearly with city size.
this remarkable combination of increasing benefits to the individual with systematic increasing benefits for the collective as city size increases is the underlying driving force for the continued explosion of urbanization across the planet.
The underlying commonality that is being expressed by the surprising universality of urban scaling laws is that the structure and dynamics of human social networks are very much the same everywhere.
Cities are therefore much more than giant organisms or anthills: they rely on long-range, complex exchanges of people, goods, and knowledge. They are invariably magnets for creative and innovative individuals, and stimulants for economic growth, wealth production, and new ideas.
Cities provide a natural mechanism for reaping the benefits of high social connectivity between people conceiving and solving problems in a diversity of ways.
the invariant terminal units of these networks, the analogs of capillaries, cells, leaves, and petioles, are people and their houses.
market forces and social dynamics are continually at work, so it’s not entirely unreasonable to speculate that the evolution of infrastructural networks has moved toward minimizing costs and energy use.
relative to what we saw in the scaling of most metrics in biology there is a much greater spread of the data around the idealized scaling curves for cities.
This greater variance reflects the much shorter time cities have had to organically evolve toward the idealized optimal configuration represented by the scaling curves—the
The deviations from these lines are a measure of the residual footprint of the unique history, geography, and culture of each individual city
If we think of the city as the great facilitator of social interactions or as the great incubator for wealth creation and innovation, it is natural to speculate that its structure and dynamics evolved so as to maximize social capital by optimizing the connectivity between individuals.
greed in its various forms is an important contributor to the socioeconomic dynamics of cities.
it is the social analog of the evolutionary biological drive of animals, including us, to maximize their metabolic power relative to their size.
With the invention of the city and its powerful combination of economies of scale coupled to innovation and wealth creation came the great divisions of society.
Hunter-gatherers were significantly less hierarchical, more egalitarian and community oriented than we are.
Nevertheless, it seems that without the motive of self-interest our entrepreneurial free market economy would collapse.
These local hubs are often referred to as “central places,” following a popular model of urban systems known as central place theory
it’s a static, highly symmetric geometric model for how cities and urban systems are physically configured. It was postulated by Walter Christaller
