Four simple principles to plan the best city possible

New Scientist, by Luís Bettencourt, 18 December 2013

From the benefits of social living to average walking speed, cities great and small have
more in common than you might think, a physicist says.
IMAGINE a very social species, one in which individuals can improve their lot through
contact with others. The basic problem that such a species must solve is how to create an
environment that nurtures its large-scale sociability. This problem is shared to some extent
by all of nature's social species, but humans havecreated an entirely new solution: the city.
From Venice to Tokyo, cities are obviously very different from each other, yet they are also
elaborations on the same theme. When Hernán Cortés arrived in Tenochtitlan (today's Mexico
City) in 1519, he marvelled at its size and wealth. But the true amazement should have been
at how familiar it all was: the markets, the canals and roads, the politics. By analysing what is
common to all urban areas - past and present, developed and developing, big and small - we
can figure out what cities are all about.
We live in an era of increasing data availability, which makes this scientific approach to
cities possible. In the past few years a comparative analysis of cities has revealed that they all
share some fundamental properties: cities of different sizes perform similar functions, as
scaled versions of each other. Per capita, most social and economic quantities are larger in
bigger cities, so that in New York City wages and prices are predictably higher than in smaller
US cities. This scaling effect includes all kinds of urban variables, from violent crime to the
incidence of certain infectious diseases, and from personal income to innovation. The premium
is about a 10 to 20 per cent increase, per person, compared with a city with half
the population.
It's the opposite for city infrastructure. The total area of roads, the volume of pipes and
cables falls by 10 to 20 per cent per capita for a doubling in city population.
What are the underlying forces that cause cities to scale up or down in these predictable ways?
I've been fascinated by this puzzle for a long time. After almost 10 years of obsessing over
these questions and, with colleagues, poring over data for thousands of cities worldwide, I had
a series of epiphanies. We can understand why cities are the way they are, thanks to four
simple principles.
The key is not to think of cities just as a collection of buildings or people, but as a web
of social interactions embedded in space. This leads to my first "city principle": that cities
develop so that citizens can, in theory, meet anybody else in the city. This principle is rooted
in the concept of "mixing", taken from population biology and epidemiology.
Mixing can only occur if people can afford to move around the city. This is my second principle:
that urban mobility is essential for mixing, but it comes at a cost. The balance between the
benefits of social interactions and movement costs sets the spatial boundaries of cities. We
observe, for example, that as transportation becomes faster and cheaper, cities all over the
world tend to become less dense.
These principles describe how space and social interactions are entangled. In their most
basic manifestations, they are likely very old and probably equally applicable to the first cities
that arose, about 10,000 years ago. But to explain large modern cities we need two additional
principles.
 When people join a city, how does the urban infrastructure develop? Analysis shows
that infrastructure - from paths to highways, pipes to water mains - grows gradually both in
tandem with socioeconomic development and with the size of the city. This is the basis for
my third principle: that city infrastructural networks grow incrementally and this growth is
decentralised, because it arises locally from an adaptation to human social needs rather than
from a central master plan.
Finally, although cities can become immense, the cognitive abilities of the people who
live in them remain limited, as does the personal energy they can put into their daily lives.
This leads to my fourth principle: that human effort is "bounded" - a concept echoing
the bounded rationality theory in economics. Cities are an ingenious solution to the limitations
of their inhabitants: they are an environment that effectively shrinks space and time
(through increased density and movement) so that, with the same effort, humans will
experience a greater number of more diverse encounters with others.
These four principles can be combined in a mathematical model to make predictions for
many facets of urban environments (Science, vol 340, p 1438). This model accurately predicts
the scaling of urban quantities for thousands of cities worldwide, including the area of paved
surfaces for 3600 cities, and that of road infrastructure in US and Japanese cities, as well as
land rents and average walking speed. It also helps to unveil one of the mysteries of
urban planning: the relation between social and spatial structure. Cities
are evolving fractal-geometric objects that entangle these social and infrastructural networks
in just the right way to accelerate human social life.
As we gain a better understanding of cities, we can use these models to imagine how to
achieve the same social processes better. In this way my models can better define "urban
efficiency" - a balance between the density, mobility and social connectivity of
urban environments and the cost of maintaining these connections. The model predicts that for
each city there is a sweet spot where the best balance of social contacts is achieved in relation
to the cost of making these contacts - a useful tool for urban planners.
We can also use this new understanding of cities to conduct fun thought experiments.
What, for instance, can we strip away from the way cities are currently built while retaining the
same function? We can even speculate about the possibility of getting rid of space altogether:
could we, using the internet or other future networks of social interaction, build virtual cities
that preserve the serendipity, tension and excitement of sharing common ground while doing
away with physical space altogether? If and when we solve this
conundrum, we will be on our way to the next great urban revolution.
The city and the stars
Is there anything analogous to a city in the natural world? Cities have been compared
to brains, organisms, ecosystems and machines, but are any of these analogies correct or
useful?
For sure, some characteristics of cities resemble natural structures. The vasculature of a
leaf is a bit like the layout of roads, for example, but this resemblance is only superficial.
Unlike in organisms, urban infrastructure is open-ended, so that it can adapt to accommodate
more people. Cities are not analogous to machines or other engineering systems either
(though parts of cities may behave in this way in the short term) because they self-
organise and evolve.
 I can only think of one system in nature that operates like a city: a star. A star is a
nuclear reactor, whereas a city is a "social reactor". A star, like a city, forms when there is an
implosion of interacting elements impelled by their attractive interactions. And as they get
bigger, both become denser and "shine brighter". But cities are much more complex than
stars in the information they produce and their ability to evolve.
Luís Bettencourt is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico, who researches
the hidden laws by which complex systems arise and evolve. He has a PhD from Imperial
College London in the statistical physics of the early universe.