Humanity has crossed a historic threshold where a majority of people worldwide now live in cities. Yet, even as the debate on how humans impact the natural environment grows, urbanization and its consequences remains poorly understood. For many people, cities are seen as principal sources of social and environmental problems, yet they are also engines of innovation and wealth creation. Recently, Los Alamos scientists studied various features of urbanization in order to better understand their implications for future urban growth.
In research reported in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team of researchers from Los Alamos, Santa Fe Institute, Arizona State University, and Germany's Dresden University of Technology describe their work applying universal scaling laws to the social organization and social dynamics of urbanization. The team analyzed a large number of urban indicators in the US, China and several European countries, covering measures of economic productivity, innovation, demographics, crime, public health, infrastructure and patterns of human behavior. They discovered that all these quantities follow simple statistical scaling relations with population, indicating a continuum of change from small cities to the largest megalopolis.
According to Los Alamos researcher Luis Bettencourt, "Although people are sometimes quick to point out the blights of large cities, they often forget their contribution to global economic growth and culture. New York City, for example is estimated to have an economy larger than that of India and Tokyo's is even larger."
The study revealed that measures of wealth creation and innovation, among other things, increase per capita with city size, in such a way that doubling the size of a city increases its economic productivity per person by about 15 percent.
"What is fascinating and surprising about our results," Bettencourt adds, "is that they show that the good things about cities - such as innovation - and the bad ones - such as crime and the incidence of certain diseases - increase predictably in the same proportion as cities become larger. There is a continuum in these quantities that accelerates dynamics that are already there in the smallest towns, yet become more apparent and conspicuous in the largest cities."
The authors believe that the results of this study will change the way people think of cities and project their growth. Although many of today's megacities present some of most daunting problems in terms of poverty and overtaxed infrastructure, these can be overcome via the ingenuity and resources that are already present in these places, as has happened historically in metropolis of now developed countries.
In addition to Bettencourt, other members of the team included Geoffrey West from the Santa Fe Institute, Jose Lobo from Arizona State University, and Dirk Helbing and Christian Kuehnert from the Dresden University of Technology.
Los Alamos National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, is operated by Los Alamos National Security, LLC, a team composed of Bechtel National, the University of California, The Babcock & Wilcox Company, and the Washington Division of URS for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.
Los Alamos enhances national security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health, and global security concerns.