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where 1.15 for the socioeconomic quantities and 0.85 for the infrastructural ones. A city twice the size of another does not simply have twice the patents and twice the roads; it tends to have somewhat more than twice the patents and somewhat less than twice the road surface. The paper’s own framing is worth stating precisely, because it is often flattened into a slogan: doubling a city’s population is associated with roughly a fifteen percent bonus in per-capita innovation and wealth, and a corresponding roughly fifteen percent saving in per-capita infrastructure, at the same time. This is the opposite of how biological organisms scale — an elephant’s metabolism…
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Equation 5 · Technological Evolution
Cities Are Organisms That Refuse to Die: Urban Evolution to 2100
This equation gives an approximation: it relates the quantities while allowing an approximation.
where 1.15 for the socioeconomic quantities and 0.85 for the infrastructural ones. A city twice the size of another does not simply have twice the patents and twice the roads; it tends to have somewhat more than twice the patents and somewhat less than twice the road surface. The paper’s own framing is worth stating precisely, because it is often flattened into a slogan: doubling a city’s population is associated with roughly a fifteen percent bonus in per-capita innovation and wealth, and a corresponding roughly fifteen percent saving in per-capita infrastructure, at the same time. This is the opposite of how biological organisms scale — an elephant’s metabolism…
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