Geoffrey West: City

“It’s hard to kill a city, but easy to kill a company.”

Geoffrey West

2010s
Source: Austin Brown. " Geoffrey B. West, 'Why Cities Keep on Growing, Corporations Always Die, and Life Gets Faster' http://blog.longnow.org/02011/07/26/geoffrey-b-west-%E2%80%9Cwhy-cities-keep-on-growing-corporations-always-die-and-life-gets-faster%E2%80%9D/." at blog.longnow.org, July 26th, 2011.

“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.”

Geoffrey West

2010s
Source: Ben Lillie. " The sameness of organisms, cities, and corporations: Q&A with Geoffrey West http://blog.ted.com/qa-with-geoffrey-west/." at blog.ted.com. July 26, 2011.

Law , Behavior

“Humanity has just crossed a major landmark in its history with the majority of people now living in cities. Cities have long been known to be society's predominant engine of innovation and wealth creation, yet they are also its main source of crime, pollution, and disease. The inexorable trend toward urbanization worldwide presents an urgent challenge for developing a predictive, quantitative theory of urban organization and sustainable development”

Geoffrey West

Bettencourt, L. M., Lobo, J., Helbing, D., Kühnert, C., & West, G. B. (2007). " Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities http://www.pnas.org/content/104/17/7301.long." Proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 104(17), 7301–7306.
2000s

People , Disease , History , Wealth

“The good news is cities are extraordinarily resilient. The bad news is that they are also very hard to change.”

Geoffrey West

2010s
Source: Joao Medeiros. " The city in numbers: An equation that explains urban life http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/05/start/the-city-in-numbers," in wired.co.uk/magazine 29 March 2011.

Change

“Cities are the crucible of civilization.”

Geoffrey West

2010s
Source: Austin Brown. " Geoffrey B. West, 'Why Cities Keep on Growing, Corporations Always Die, and Life Gets Faster' http://blog.longnow.org/02011/07/26/geoffrey-b-west-%E2%80%9Cwhy-cities-keep-on-growing-corporations-always-die-and-life-gets-faster%E2%80%9D/." at blog.longnow.org, July 26th, 2011.