Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

by Geoffrey West

this suggests that the hidden fractal nature of social networks is actually a representation of the physical structure of our brains. This speculation can be taken one step further by invoking the idea that the structure and organization of cities are determined by the structure and dynamics of social networks, in which case the universal fractality of cities can be viewed as a projection of the universal fractality of social networks. Putting all of this together we are led to the outrageous speculation that cities are effectively a scaled representation of the structure of the human brain. It’s a pretty wild conjecture, but it graphically incorporates the idea that there is a universal character to cities. In a nutshell: cities are a representation of how people interact with one another and this is encoded in our neural networks and therefore in the structure and organization of our brains.