Geoffrey West
Geoffrey West
Geoffrey Brian Westis a British theoretical physicist, former president and distinguished professor of the Santa Fe Institute. He is one of the leading scientists working on a scientific model of cities. Among other things his work states that with the doubling of a city's size, services per capita will generally increase by 15%...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionPhysicist
science taking
Every fundamental law has exceptions. But you still need the law or else all you have is observations that don't make sense. And that's not science. That's just taking notes.
bomb came grew recovering saw sites war
When I first saw California, it was extraordinary. Because I came from old, black, dark England, still recovering from World War II. I grew up with bomb sites everywhere.
order cities ideas
We form cities in order to enhance interaction, to facilitate growth, wealth creation, ideas, innovation, but in so doing, we create, from a physicists viewpoint, entropy.
powerful data physics
The paradigm of physics - with its interplay of data, theory and prediction - is the most powerful in science.
order law cities
You could not have evolved a complex system like a city or an organism - with an enormous number of components - without the emergence of laws that constrain their behavior in order for them to be resilient.
cities metaphor arteries
Cities are obvious metaphors for life. We call roads arteries and so forth.
cities civilization crucible
Cities are the crucible of civilization.
organization culture levels
One of the remarkable things about slums is that they do develop their own social organization and economy and even culture that is, on some level, functional and in some cases, remarkably resilient. This is kind of amazing.
boring cities exciting stay
Exciting cities stay exciting, and boring cities stay boring.
great magnet people plays sucking
A city plays the role of a great big magnet that's sucking people up.
bit lead slums tumor ultimately unhealthy ways
Slums could be thought of as the development of a special organ, or they could be thought of as a tumor that's grown, and in some ways is unhealthy and could ultimately lead to the city's destruction. My own feeling is that slums are probably a bit of both.
scale woven
Everything around us is scale dependent. It's woven into the fabric of the universe.
life
Life is extraordinarily resilient. It's been around for over a billion years.
change ourselves requires traded
Once we started to urbanize, we put ourselves on this treadmill. We traded away stability for growth. And growth requires change.