Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Cities and sustainability

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • #16
    Who said cities are (self)sustainable?
    No such thing as a good tax - Churchill

    To make mistakes is human. To blame someone else for your mistake, is strategic.

    Comment


    • #17
      ^ OP, second quote, second sentence.

      Comment


      • #18
        Originally posted by Captain Worley View Post
        ^ OP, second quote, second sentence.
        I didn’t mean self-sustainable, I meant sustainable on a global scale. More efficient cities allow us to be more sustainable at that scale. I realise you already acknowledged this in part and alluded to what you thought I meant.

        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 times
        have 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
        The 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
        Open-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.
        What they have achieved in part is to set out a framework for ranking the performance of cities, providing in theory, a way to plan and set targets when managing their growth and planning their creation/expansion.
        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.

        Comment


        • #19
          Originally posted by tantalus View Post
          The 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
          They are refuting their own contention that cities are sustainable.

          Comment


          • #20
            Originally posted by Captain Worley View Post
            They are refuting their own contention that cities are sustainable.
            They are doing what good scientists do, considering multiple sides of a complex topic and not presenting a simplified picture for the sake of it. Assuming the demands for innovation are not met than it would appear that they are claiming growth cannot continue. I don't think you need continued growth to ensure that urban living can be more efficient than rural living . Furthermore, that warning doesnt automatically dismiss the conclusions they have also drawn regarding such efficienies.

            Comment

            Working...
            X