Urban Scaling and Its Deviations (Bettencourt et al.)

Details

Photo

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Name

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Field

Complexity science / Urban science

Year

2010

Core idea in one line

As cities grow, a lot of things — from patents to crime — follow surprisingly regular scaling laws.

My take

The graphs make you see New York not as a special snowflake but as one dot on a weird power-law curve with São Paulo and Shenzhen.

Good starting point for

Thinking of cities as massive, rule-following organisms rather than one-off exceptions.