The city quantified by math

[iheartthed]

There was a good article published in the NYT recently about a physicist who has found a way to apply mathematical formulas to any city. The physicist, Geoffrey West, says the city is basically a generic function -- the combination of what you put in determines what you get out:

The correspondence was obvious to West: he saw the metropolis as a sprawling organism, similarly defined by its infrastructure. [[The boulevard was like a blood vessel, the back alley a capillary.) This implied that the real purpose of cities, and the reason cities keep on growing, is their ability to create massive economies of scale, just as big animals do. After analyzing the first sets of city data — the physicists began with infrastructure and consumption statistics — they concluded that cities looked a lot like elephants. In city after city, the indicators of urban “metabolism,” like the number of gas stations or the total surface area of roads, showed that when a city doubles in size, it requires an increase in resources of only 85 percent.

I thought that quote was particularly significant to Detroit because the Detroit Metropolitan area has urbanized area at a far faster pace than it's population growth, while the scientist shows that most cities urbanize area at a ratio less than the rate of growth. Helps to explain why the center of Detroit is barren while the population of Detroit has not moved much either way...

What Bettencourt and West failed to appreciate, at least at first, was that the value of modern cities has little to do with energy efficiency. As West puts it, “Nobody moves to New York to save money on their gas bill.” Why, then, do we put up with the indignities of the city? Why do we accept the failing schools and overpriced apartments, the bedbugs and the traffic?

In essence, they arrive at the sensible conclusion that cities are valuable because they facilitate human interactions, as people crammed into a few square miles exchange ideas and start collaborations. “If you ask people why they move to the city, they always give the same reasons,” West says. “They’ve come to get a job or follow their friends or to be at the center of a scene. That’s why we pay the high rent. Cities are all about the people, not the infrastructure.”

We were recently having a discussion here about a hypothetical abandonment of Manhattan for Detroit by artists and young professionals. The above quote is exactly why it's not likely to happen anytime soon. The physicist explained it a lot better than I did in the other thread. I said it was ambitions without giving much insight beyond. But really it's about the social interactions and how they feed into ambitions. Detroit has to become a place of social interaction if the city is to survive:

In recent decades, though, many of the fastest-growing cities in America, like Phoenix and Riverside, Calif., have given us a very different urban model. These places have traded away public spaces for affordable single-family homes, attracting working-class families who want their own white picket fences. West and Bettencourt point out, however, that cheap suburban comforts are associated with poor performance on a variety of urban metrics. Phoenix, for instance, has been characterized by below-average levels of income and innovation [[as measured by the production of patents) for the last 40 years. “When you look at some of these fast-growing cities, they look like tumors on the landscape,” West says, with typical bombast. “They have these extreme levels of growth, but it’s not sustainable growth.”

It should be no surprise that Riverside and Phoenix were also places that were most affected by the recent recession.

That said, it's not all sunshine about cities and our global urbanization trend:

West illustrates the problem by translating human life into watts. “A human being at rest runs on 90 watts,” he says. “That’s how much power you need just to lie down. And if you’re a hunter-gatherer and you live in the Amazon, you’ll need about 250 watts. That’s how much energy it takes to run about and find food. So how much energy does our lifestyle [in America] require? Well, when you add up all our calories and then you add up the energy needed to run the computer and the air-conditioner, you get an incredibly large number, somewhere around 11,000 watts. Now you can ask yourself: What kind of animal requires 11,000 watts to live? And what you find is that we have created a lifestyle where we need more watts than a blue whale. We require more energy than the biggest animal that has ever existed. That is why our lifestyle is unsustainable. We can’t have seven billion blue whales on this planet. It’s not even clear that we can afford to have 300 million blue whales.”

The historian Lewis Mumford described the rise of the megalopolis as “the last stage in the classical cycle of civilization,” which would end with “complete disruption and downfall.” In his more pessimistic moods, West seems to agree: he knows that nothing can trend upward forever.

I think it is a good read. I certainly hope the mayor has a copy.

Full article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/ma...pagewanted=all

[EastsideAl]

...many of the fastest-growing cities in America, like Phoenix and Riverside, Calif., have given us a very different urban model. These places have traded away public spaces for affordable single-family homes, attracting working-class families who want their own white picket fences.

Sounds a lot like the way Detroit grew from 1900 to 1950. May say something about our history and culture here, and why our 'urbaness' has been so brittle and our city has not sustained itself.

[iheartthed]

Sounds a lot like the way Detroit grew from 1900 to 1950. May say something about our history and culture here, and why our 'urbaness' has been so brittle and our city has not sustained itself.

I believe that most of Detroit's detached housing [[where most city residents live today) was built after 1940.

[EastsideAl]

No, Detroit was always primarily a city of detached single family homes. The central city is full of houses built between 1900 and 1940. Many are 2 family flats, but the majority are single-family homes. I grew up in a couple of them.