Scaling Laws in Cities (Interview with Geoffrey West - Santa Fe Institute)
Channel: Metabolism of Cities
Date: 2022-03-09

📺 Welcome to the 45th episode of the Circular Metabolism Podcast: Scaling Laws in Cities with Prof. Geoffrey West 📺.

🏙️ on today’s episode we will talk about complex adaptive systems, Kleiber’s law and how it is possible predict based on the size of the city how many patents it’s produced, how long are all of its roads or how many violent crimes have been committed. I can imagine that you might be lifting an eyebrow asking yourself how is that possible. 

🎓 Well don’t worry to answer these questions I have the distinguished Prof Geoffrey West from Santa Fe Institute. Geoffrey is a physicist that has worked on particle theory but then shifted and focused his carrier to identify power laws in biology or in other terms how organisms and mammals metabolic rate change when we scale them up or down. He tested these power laws in cities and some surprising findings come out of it. All these elements can be found in his book “Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies”

🙏 Enjoy this episode and before you go, please help us improve our podcast by subscribing to your favourite app including Youtube, iTunes, Spotify, or Stitcher and leave us a comment 📝 with your thoughts.

0:00 Introduction of the episode
2:02 Introduction of Geoffrey West
 3:02 How does a physicist becomes interested in biology? 
13:24 What is Kleiber’s law?
32:59 How did the biologists react to your work?
 42:34 What is complexity? (VIDEO)
49:55 Scaling laws in cities (this episode is dedicated to Joao)
53:30 Can you help bridge the dichotomy between the quantitative and qualitative understanding of cities
1:04:17 What are scaling laws applied to cities?
1:27:21 What are the applications facing global sustainability challenges based on the knowledge of scaling laws in cities?
1:38:08 What will you work on during 2022
1:42:08 Can you recommend any books, movies or other media?


👋Hello everyone and Welcome to the Circular Metabolism podcast, the bi-weekly meeting where we have in-depth discussions with thinkers, researchers, activists, policy makers and practitioners to better understand the metabolism of our cities and how to reduce their environmental impact in a socially just and context-specific way. 

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#scaling #scalinglaws #powerlaws #cities #geoffreywest

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