Cities Obey the Laws of Living Things

Summary

Who would disagree with Dickens that London’s green spaces are the city’s “lungs?” A city is an animal that sleeps, although some never do, like New York City or Hong Kong. All cities are creatures of a sort. Some have multiple “faces” they present to the world, most have a “beating heart” where the action unfolds, and it is a rare city that lacks a dark “underbelly.” The analogy of city as living organism is so established, in fact, that it has crossed over into the realm of scientific inquiry. For at least a decade, researchers have been attempting to decode what lessons for sustainable planning could emerge from thinking of cities as living breathing beings.Now a team of scientists from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) has found that all cities—whether Tokyo, Lagos, or Zurich—operate according to predictable principles that govern animal biology in the natural world. In the process, they challenged a longstanding assumption: that bigger cities are more sustainable than small ones.“Bigger cities are often considered ‘better,’” says Gabriele Manoli, a study author and head of EPFL’s Laboratory of Urban and Environmental Systems, in an email. “Yet, these laws depend on the definition of a city.” The findings, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could influence how urban planners design the cities of the future.Cities self-organize as they grow regardless of context and without central planning. ADVERTISEMENT Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Planners have long postulated that bigger is better because large urban areas require fewer resources and energy per capita and generate more wealth. But this was difficult to model because of the ad-hoc way city boundaries are often drawn. Where does the true edge of a city lie? To resolve this problem, Manoli and his colleagues “re-scaled” 100 cities around the globe, breaking them down into units they called pixels that could be more equitably co...