Cities

Dietrich Braess (1968) - An extension of the road network may cause a redistribution of the traffic that results in longer individual running times. (Braess' Paradox)

Bruce Frier - All the great cities of antiquity, with their fetid conditions and high mortality rates, were heavy net consumers of population.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (in Émile ou de l’éducation, 1762) - Les hommes ne sont point faits pour être entassés en fourmilières, mais épars sur la terre qu’ils doivent cultiver. Plus ils se rassemblent, plus ils se corrompent. (...) Les villes sont le gouffre de l’espèce humaine. English: Men are not made to be piled one upon the other as in anthills, but scattered on the land they have to cultivate. The more they gather, the more they corrupt one another. (...) Cities are the abyss of the human species.

Geoffrey West - [Cities] have their own culture, history, and geography. They have their own planners, politicians, and architects. Yet (...) each city is not so unique after all. If you look at any infrastructural quantity—the number of gas stations, the surface area of the roads, the length of electric cables—it always scales as the population of the city raised to approximately the 0.85 power.

Geoffrey West - When we looked at socioeconomic quantities—quantities that have no analogue in biology, like wages, patents produced, crime, number of police, et cetera—we found that unlike everything we’d seen in biology, cities scale in a superlinear fashion: The exponent was bigger than 1, about 1.15. That means that when you double the size of the city, you get more than double the amount of both good and bad socioeconomic quantities—patents, aids cases, wages, crime, and so on.