Who said cities are (self)sustainable?
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Cities and sustainability
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Originally posted by Captain Worley View Post^ OP, second quote, second sentence.
Let me go into a bit more detail and link the actual paper which the op article discusses.
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/17/7301.long
This is what the paper sets out to achieve, to discover quantitative patterns in how cities function as they grow. Yet, it also analyses human behavior and innovation with increasing size, even how people walk faster as cities get larger. Therefore, it goes much further than just matters of economies of scale relating only to infrastructure and energy, although that is a significant aspect.
despite much historical evidence (19, 20) that cities are the principal engines of innovation and economic growth, a quantitative, predictive theory for understanding their dynamics and organization (23, 24) and estimating their future trajectory and stability remains elusive.We present an extensive body of empirical evidence showing that important demographic, socioeconomic, and behavioral urban indicators are, on average, scaling functions of city size that are quantitatively consistent across different nations and timeshave shown that cities belonging to the same urban system obey pervasive scaling relations with population size, characterizing rates of innovation, wealth creation, patterns of consumption and human behavior as well as properties of urban infrastructure
Thus, to sustain continued growth, major innovations or adaptations must arise at an accelerated rate. Not only does the pace of life increase with city size, but so also must the rate at which new major adaptations and innovations need to be introduced to sustain the cityOpen-ended wealth and knowledge creation require the pace of life to increase with organization size and for individuals and institutions to adapt at a continually accelerating rate to avoid stagnation or potential crises. These conclusions very likely generalize to other social organizations, such as corporations and businesses, potentially explaining why continuous growth necessitates an accelerating treadmill of dynamical cycles of innovation.
New indices of urban rank according to deviations from the predictions of scaling laws also provide more accurate measures of the successes and failures of local factors (including policy) in shaping specific cities.
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Originally posted by tantalus View PostThe paper also discusses the implications that this has for the need for continued growth and innovation to sustain the urban growth. Admittedly, I am unable to understand properly what there getting at in this regard.
Thus, to sustain continued growth, major innovations or adaptations must arise at an accelerated rate. Not only does the pace of life increase with city size, but so also must the rate at which new major adaptations and innovations need to be introduced to sustain the city
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Originally posted by Captain Worley View PostThey are refuting their own contention that cities are sustainable.
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