The Completely Puzzling Relationship Between City Population and Parks

The physicist Geoffrey West and his collaborators famously found that cities obey some universal scaling laws in the same way that much of biology does. Take the population of a city anywhere in the world, and these laws can predict with startling accuracy the size of the city’s road network or its output in patents or its quantity of crime. This is because so much about urban life scales to population. The larger a city gets, the less infrastructure it needs per capita. At the same time, as populations increase, problems like crime and benefits like intellectual property proliferate at an even greater rate than one-to-one (when a city doubles in size, for instance, it produces more than twice the patents).

In these reliable, mathematical ways, cities mimic nature. And yet, ironically, there is one element of cities that doesn’t seem to follow any scaling law: nature itself.