"Everything around us is scale dependent. Its woven into the fabric of the universe."
Geoffrey Brian West is a British theoretical physicist and former president and distinguished professor of the Santa Fe Institute. He is one of the leading scientists working on a scientific model of cities. Among other things, his work states that with the doubling of a city's population, salaries per capita will generally increase by 15%.
"Humanity has just crossed a major landmark in its history with the majority of people now living in cities. Cities have long been known to be societys predominant engine of innovation and wealth creation, yet they are also its main source of crime, pollution, and disease. The inexorable trend toward urbanization worldwide presents an urgent challenge for developing a predictive, quantitative theory of urban organization and sustainable development"
"I’ve always wanted to find the rules that govern everything. It’s amazing that such rules exist. It’s even more amazing that we can find them."
"Once we started to urbanize, we put ourselves on this treadmill. We traded away stability for growth. And growth requires change."
"The good news is cities are extraordinarily resilient. The bad news is that they are also very hard to change."
"It’s hard to kill a city, but easy to kill a company."
"The paradigm of physics - with its interplay of data, theory and prediction - is the most powerful in science."