Scale

(27 Dec 2020)

What do organisms, cities, economies and organisms have in common? A lot, if Geoffrey West and his book (Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies) are right. Complex systems which have a tremendous amount of complex components and interactions (such as cities) in fact seem to have many emergent properties which can be partly rather simple to predict. Moreover, different cities (as well as companies and organisms) have many similarities in terms of scale. In other words, you can find similar properties in cities of a given size. For example social parameters (walking speed, number of innovations/patents, crime rates, some efficiencies) seem to have a clear relationship with the size/scale of the city, and it is fascinating how our similar collective social behavior emerges and is partly controlled by the scale. Such scale-dependent similarities are found also in companies and organisms. The book gives many examples how these hierarchical network systems may work and how the similarities can be driven by the qualities of the networks.