Can Cities really be neatly described in equations? – I doubt it myself – its still a legacy of the Enlightenment thinking that in the guise of Post-Modernism still tries to describe the infinite….

When I first read about Geoffrey West's plan to "solve the city" I was not too surprised by the his idea of metropolis as a "sprawling organism," and thus the reason cities keep on growing, "is their ability to create massive economies of scale, just as big animals do."  As a physicist he has been striving to find a single equation that solves how the city grows and in one New York Times article last year he describes that he and fellow researche … Read More

via Encountering Urbanization