Words matter. These are the best Geoffrey West Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
My provocative statement is that we desperately need a serious, scientific theory of cities and scientific theory means quantifiable, relying on underlying generic principles that can be made in a – put into a predictive framework. That’s the quest.
Everything around us is scale dependent. It’s woven into the fabric of the universe.
Cities are the crucible of civilization.
Exciting cities stay exciting, and boring cities stay boring.
It’s hard to kill a city, but easy to kill a company.
Cities tolerate crazy people. Companies don’t.
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.
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.
If you ask people why they move to the city, they always give the same reasons. 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.
Cities are obvious metaphors for life. We call roads ‘arteries’ and so forth.
I spent most of my career doing high-energy physics, quarks, dark matter, string theory and so on.
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.
Your cells are not working as hard as your dog’s but harder than your horse’s. The bigger the animal, the less energy needed to sustain a gram of tissue.
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.
Cities are the origins of global warming, impact on the environment, health, pollution, disease, finance, economies, energy are all problems that are confronted by having cities. That’s where they – all these problems come from.
We form cities in order to enhance interaction, to facilitate growth, wealth creation, ideas, innovation, but in so doing, we create, from a physicist’s viewpoint, entropy.
Sometimes, I look out at nature and I think, ‘Everything here is obeying my conjecture.’ It’s a wonderfully narcissistic feeling.
A human being at rest runs on 90 watts. 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.
Life is extraordinarily resilient. It’s been around for over a billion years.
The bigger the city is, the less infrastructure you need per capita.
Cities are just a physical manifestation of your interactions, our interactions, and the clustering and grouping of individuals.
I’ve always wanted to find the rules that govern everything. It’s amazing that such rules exist. It’s even more amazing that we can find them.
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.
A city plays the role of a great big magnet that’s sucking people up.
Once we started to urbanize, we put ourselves on this treadmill. We traded away stability for growth. And growth requires change.
