A unified theory of urban living (original) (raw)

Nature volume 467, pages 912–913 (2010)Cite this article

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It is time for a science of how city growth affects society and environment, say Luis Bettencourt and Geoffrey West.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Luis Bettencourt is a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and external professor at the Santa Fe Institute.,
    Luis Bettencourt
  2. Geoffrey West is distinguished professor at the Santa Fe Institute and senior fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory. gbw@santafe-edu ,
    Geoffrey West

Authors

  1. Luis Bettencourt
  2. Geoffrey West

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Bettencourt, L., West, G. A unified theory of urban living.Nature 467, 912–913 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/467912a

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  1. John Porter 13 December 2010, 06:02
    Food, scaling and the city
    Recent contributions on cities (Nature 467, Issue 7318; 2010) have largely ignored a central issue for their future â&#x80&#x93 that of how their inhabitants will be fed given that more than 50% of humanity resides in cities. This represents a historically significant demographic shift that will leave fewer farmers to cultivate the food on which cities currently do and will depend in the future. Over the past 40-50 years, the proportion of humans who farm has dropped by 20% to under 45%. The provisioning service of food production for cities will either have to be sourced from remote hinterlands located across the globe or cities will have to incorporate their own food production by such developments as peri-urban farming. A scientific question posed by food in the cities is how cities and the land areas needed to feed them scale in relation to city population density. The expectation is that such scaling is positively non-linear because of the highly variable biological productivity of terrestrial and marine ecosystems that produce these food services. In other words, larger cities will sequester proportionally larger and more marginal low-productive areas of land in order to be fed. Thus, the scaling between city population and land area sequestered for their food is likely to be non-linear with size of city. Local urban and peri-urban food production tends to increase the yield per unit area and may partially counteract such a trend. Providing food services to cities contradicts Bettencourt and Westâ&#x80&#x99s thesis (Nature 467, Issue 7318; 2010) that, with respect to their use of infrastructure, carbon emissions and other services, cities are proportionally more efficient per inhabitant. By contrast, food security of dense mega-cities is possible if there exist elsewhere low population dense, large land areas yielding disproportionately high food surpluses, upon which a city population can depend.
    John R Porter, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Frederiksberg 1870, Denmark, jrp@life.ku.dk
    Lisa Deutsch, Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, S-106 91 Stockholm Sweden, lisa.deutsch@stockholmresilience.su.se
    David Dumaresq, Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University, ACT 0200, Australia, david.dumaresq@anu.edu.au
    Rob Dyball, Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University, ACT 0200, Australia, rob.dyball@anu.edu.au
  2. Sarah Rain 27 November 2016, 13:11
    Just yesterday, I lost my temper trying to drive out of an out of town retail park, which like many others today, are designed to filter traffic into other businesses or sources of 'cheap' petrol, making it almost impossible to work out how to leave. EXIT signs anyone? These awful places not only waste fuel and cause immense stress to the driver/shopper, but make it all but impossible for pedestrians to safely walk across or about the parks, ruining their health and any ability to socialise.