And the really interesting thing is that cities need fewer petrol stations and miles of electrical cable or road – per head of population – as they get bigger, but have disproportionately more educational institutions, more patents and higher wages – per head of population – as they get bigger. That is to say, the infrastructure scales at a sublinear rate, but the socio-economic products of a city scale at a superlinear rate. And this pattern holds throughout the world wherever Geoffrey West and his colleagues look.
