The New York Times magazine features SFI Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West and his search for, with External Professor Luis Bettencourt, the hidden laws underlying the seeming chaos of cities.
"The urban jungle looked chaotic -- all those taxi horns and traffic jams -- but perhaps it might be found to obey a short list of universal rules. 'We spend all this time thinking about cities in terms of their local details, their restaurants and museums and weather,' West says. 'I had this hunch that there was something more, that every city was also shaped by a set of hidden laws.'"...
After two years of analysis, West and Bettencourt discovered that all of these urban variables could be described by a few exquisitely simple equations...
Read the New York Times magazine article (December 17, 2010)
More about the research of cities