At the 2010 Techonomy Conference, Geoffrey West gave a talk titled The Secrets of Scale (scroll down to find West’s talk). He offers an engaging introduction to his work on scaling phenomena in cities.
West and his colleagues examine the behavior of infrastructure and socioeconomic variables as cities grow larger. They find that some infrastructure variables, such as gasoline stations and the length of electric cables, scale sublinearly with a city’s population size. For example, rising population is associated with fewer gas stations per person and less road surface per person. Other variables, such as total employment and household water consumption tend to scale linearly with city population size.
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A crisis affords unique opportunities for reform, but a crisis of governance present an unusual dilemma: How can people trust that crisis-prone agencies will reform themselves? The recent cases of police reform in New Orleans and anti-corruption efforts in Greece illustrate the challenge of internal reform. Dysfunctional police departments and corruption plagued governments will always find it difficult to credibly commit to change. In both cases, political leaders can draw on their external allies to avoid the hazards of internal reform.
The mayor and community groups in New Orleans adopted this strategy when they recruited the federal Justice Department to help overhaul their police department. The overhaul will begin with a comprehensive review that leads to a legally binding agreement for reform — reform that will be overseen by the Justice Department rather than the police force itself or locally elected leaders.
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Parag Khanna writes about the dawning of new urban age in the latest issue of Foreign Policy.
The 21st century will not be dominated by America or China, Brazil or India, but by the city. In an age that appears increasingly unmanageable, cities rather than states are becoming the islands of governance on which the future world order will be built. This new world is not — and will not be — one global village, so much as a network of different ones.
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