planted city

Urban Metabolism: ‘Cities, Scaling and Sustainability’ (Video)

From The Santa Fe Institute via YouTube:

Humanity’s greatest social innovation remains the city, says an article in the October 2011 issue of The Atlantic mentioning SFI research that finds surprising statistical regularities among cities, patterns the researchers relate to an underlying “urban metabolism.”

Related:

• ‘A physicist turns the city into an equation’ (New York Times)
• ‘Geoffrey West: The surprising math of cities and corporations’ (TED Talks)

(Infographic: World Bank)