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Growth, Innovation, Economies of Scale and the Pace of Life; Developing a Quantitative, Predictive, Science of Cities, Companies and Sustainability

 14 March 2016
 3.00pm – 5.00pm. Registration from 2.30pm, seated by 3.00pm 
 MND Auditorium

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Resources

Lecture Poster (PDF: 415MB)
Lecture Report (PDF: 1.09KB)
Lecture Transcript (PDF: 374KB)

Lecture Videos

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Synopsis

Why do companies eventually die whereas cities grow and life accelerates? How is this related to innovation, wealth creation, social networks, and global sustainability? As centers of power, engines of innovations and wealth creation, cities are also prime sources of crime, pollution, disease, climate change and consuming resources. Despite their extraordinary complexity and diversity, there is no integrated, quantitative, predictive, mechanistic framework for understanding cities’ dynamics, growth and organization. Ideas for developing such a theory will be discussed and extended to companies to address the implications for growth, development, and long-term sustainability.

Lecture Report

“The problems we are facing on the planet today have come to the fore because of the exponential expansion of urbanisation. The stresses on resources, energy and the social fabric are an enormous challenge to the planet and we are all part of it.”

 

Global issues such as climate change, pollution and conflict over resources largely spring from cities and a science of cities is required to both understand and resolve them, says Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute.

 

Speaking at a CLC Lecture, Professor West said: “If we are to have a sustainable planet, we (need) to have sustainable cities. If we are to survive, we desperately need...a theory, a science of cities that is quantitative and predictive. It has to involve...resilience, evolvability, growth and scalability.

 

“When you study complex adaptive systems, one of the things you learn is that if you treat only one piece of it, then you are very likely to have unintended consequences that will change everything else there. Even issues as grand as dealing with energy, climate change, health or the environment need to be thought of in one unified framework.”

 

Presenting data on urban networks that take in social interactions and physical infrastructure, Professor West showed that cities exhibit scaling laws, like other complex systems in biology and physics.

 

“The good things in cities— income, wealth, patents, colleges, creative people, restaurants; and the bad things— disease, AIDS, flu, crime - all of these increase by about 15% every time you double the size of a city, and at the same time, you save 15% on the physical infrastructure (through economies of scale).”

 

Unlike the scaling laws and bounded growth seen in nature however, modern socio-economic systems are built on a paradigm of open-ended growth. This however raises questions over the sustainability of these systems.

 

“(An end to growth) is crucial in biology but it is considered disastrous in socio-economic systems. The system of exponential growth however has a dire consequence, which is that the system cannot continue (indefinitely). It must collapse at some stage. The way we have avoided collapses is to recognise that we are growing within an innovative paradigm,” Professor West explained.

 

“You are going along this curve, life is getting faster and you would collapse. Somewhere along, you’d better reset the clock with a major innovation, like the discovery of iron, the Industrial Revolution, the invention of computers. If you want to have open-ended growth which is what we have demanded, then you have to be continuously on an innovation cycle. The catch however is that the time between those innovations gets shorter.”

 

For Singapore, Professor West had one piece of advice: define and qualify your place in the world.

 

“When you look at scaling curves (of cities within a country), you can rank them, gauge their success and performance. The big issue for Singapore is you are not part of (a larger) urban system,” he said.

 

“You are unique, you are part of the global urban system, but no one knows what that is. How can you prepare unless you know what is in the global urban system? Singapore (needs to) think about what it means to be a global city, where it sits within the global urban system, where it over-performs or under-performs in that system and its trajectory.”

 

Written by Alvin Chua.

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About the Speakers

 

 

Events

• Science of Cities Symposium
• World Cities Summit
• CLC Lecture Series
• CLC Webinar Series
• Other Events