Scientific Proof That Cities Are Like Nothing Else in Nature

Practically since the dawn of cities, people have been trying to define them. Cities are like machines that can be optimized! Or insect colonies in social structure! Or ecosystems in biology! When humans cluster together in dense settlements, it’s clear that we collectively create some kind of dynamic thing that is capable – apart from all of our individual effort – of evolving and producing creative and economic outputs that simply aren’t found on the farm. But how do we conceptualize that thing?

“People have thought about cities just about every possible way since the Greeks,” says Luis Bettencourt, a physicist with the Santa Fe Institute, the scientific research and education center. “It’s an incredibly rich topic, and I think the curious thing is that we’ve tried to throw every analogy at it. But there’s a sense in which most of them fail somewhere. And to me, what that always meant was that we needed to discover better what cities really are.”