Santa Fe Institute

Cities, Scaling and Sustainability News

SFI News

Cities must be allowed to evolve
- The Guardian (U.K.)
Sept. 13, 2013 -

An article in The Guardian about ways to build sustainable cities offers advice from several experts, beginning with SFI Professor Luis Bettencourt.

Big city, big data: Cities are 'fields of information to be harvested'
- New Statesman
Aug. 30, 2013 -

The city is no longer just a place but a living field of information to be harvested, according to an article that cites early work at SFI to see if Kleiber's Law helped describe cities.

Science in a complex world: What are cities, really?
- Santa Fe New Mexican
July 18, 2013 -

Cities have been compared to everything from beehives to river networks, but most of these metaphors fall short. SFI Professor Luis Bettencourt looks to the data to suggest a new way of thinking about how cities function and grow.

Video: Geoffrey West on the good news and bad news of urbanization
July 12, 2013 -

In delivering the 2013 Pardee Distinguished Lecture at Boston University, SFI Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West described how the rapid pace of urbanization is likely to both bring challenges and prompt innovative solutions.

Cities are a new kind of complex system: part star, part network
- Science
June 20, 2013 -

In a cover paper in the June 20 issue of Science, SFI Professor Luis Bettencourt offers a unified, quantitative framework for understanding how cities function and grow.

Children's museum exhibit explores the science of cities, SFI style
May 30, 2013 -

A new multimedia exhibit at the Santa Fe Children's Museum gives kids a glimpse of what SFI scientists are learning about cities.

States of complexity: Why and how did the state emerge in human societies?
May 3, 2013 -

SFI’s interactive science magazine, the SFI Bulletin, is now live. Our first issue of 2013, "States of Complexity," explores the increasing complexity of human society.

Quantitative urbanism: The city as one giant math problem
- Smithsonian magazine
May 2, 2013 -

A feature in the May issue of Smithsonian reviews the birth at SFI of the growing field of "quantitative urbanism" and its progress toward an improved theoretical, mathematical understanding of cities.

Is there a mathematical relationship between city size and green space?
- The Atlantic Cities
April 23, 2013 -

The Atlantic's Emily Badger asks whether mathematical scaling relationships found in past SFI research can be extended to natural space, such as parks and tree cover.

City productivity: Population size or density?
April 23, 2013 -

In revisiting whether the productivity of cities is linked most directly to city size or population density, Forbes contributor Joel Kotkin cites SFI research.