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Introduction to Urban Science: Evidence and Theory of Cities as Complex Systems
A novel, integrative approach to cities as complex adaptive systems, applicable to issues ranging from innovation to economic prosperity to settlement patterns.
Human beings around the world increasingly live in urban environments. In Introduction to Urban Science, Luis Bettencourt takes a novel, integrative approach to understanding cities as complex adaptive systems, claiming that they require us to frame the field of urban science in a way that goes beyond existing theory in such traditional disciplines as sociology, geography, and economics. He explores the processes facilitated by and, in many cases, unleashed for the first time by urban life through the lenses of social heterogeneity, complex networks, scaling, circular causality, and information.
Though the idea that cities are complex adaptive systems has become mainstream, until now those who study cities have lacked a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding cities and urbanization, for generating useful and falsifiable predictions, and for constructing a solid body of empirical evidence so that the discipline of urban science can continue to develop. Bettencourt applies his framework to such issues as innovation and development across scales, human reasoning and strategic decision-making, patterns of settlement and mobility and their influence on socioeconomic life and resource use, inequality and inequity, biodiversity, and the challenges of sustainable development in both high- and low-income nations. It is crucial, says Bettencourt, to realize that cities are not zero-sum games and that knowledge, human cooperation, and collective action can build a better future.
Human beings around the world increasingly live in urban environments. In Introduction to Urban Science, Luis Bettencourt takes a novel, integrative approach to understanding cities as complex adaptive systems, claiming that they require us to frame the field of urban science in a way that goes beyond existing theory in such traditional disciplines as sociology, geography, and economics. He explores the processes facilitated by and, in many cases, unleashed for the first time by urban life through the lenses of social heterogeneity, complex networks, scaling, circular causality, and information.
Though the idea that cities are complex adaptive systems has become mainstream, until now those who study cities have lacked a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding cities and urbanization, for generating useful and falsifiable predictions, and for constructing a solid body of empirical evidence so that the discipline of urban science can continue to develop. Bettencourt applies his framework to such issues as innovation and development across scales, human reasoning and strategic decision-making, patterns of settlement and mobility and their influence on socioeconomic life and resource use, inequality and inequity, biodiversity, and the challenges of sustainable development in both high- and low-income nations. It is crucial, says Bettencourt, to realize that cities are not zero-sum games and that knowledge, human cooperation, and collective action can build a better future.
- GenresCities
496 pages, Hardcover
Published August 17, 2021
About the author
Luís M. A. Bettencourt
2 books8 followersLuís M. A. Bettencourt is the Inaugural Director of the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation and Professor of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, as well as an External Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute. He was trained as a theoretical physicist and obtained his undergraduate degree from Instituto Superior Técnico (Lisbon, Portugal) in 1992, and his PhD from Imperial College (University of London, UK) in 1996 for research in statistical and high-energy physics models of the early Universe. He has held postdoctoral positions at the University of Heidelberg (Germany), Los Alamos National Laboratory (Director’s Fellow and Slansky Fellow) and at MIT (Center for Theoretical Physics). He has worked extensively on complex systems theory and on cities and urbanization, in particular. His research emphasizes the creation of new interdisciplinary synthesis to describe cities in quantitative and predictive ways, informed by classical theory from various disciplines and the growing availability of empirical data worldwide. He is the author of over 100 scientific papers and several edited books. His research has been featured in leading media venues, such as the New York Times, Nature, Wired, New Scientist, and the Smithsonian.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 5, 2022
Although much of it was already published as papers it is still worth le détour largement !
I'd gladly swap this one with Panerai's books. Not that Panerai isn't interesting but to me it's a bit outdated. I mean yes it's optional to know about urban form and all, but what if I told you that this book will give you a wider view on cities and theories around them.
Not only you'll be into some metrics and calculations but the book is inspired by Jane Jacobs ' seminal work on cities! She was the first one to consider cities as problems in organized complexity. So on top of being an activist, Jacobs was a visionary.
I could go on talking about cities as complex adaptive systems - but I'll stop here!
I'd gladly swap this one with Panerai's books. Not that Panerai isn't interesting but to me it's a bit outdated. I mean yes it's optional to know about urban form and all, but what if I told you that this book will give you a wider view on cities and theories around them.
Not only you'll be into some metrics and calculations but the book is inspired by Jane Jacobs ' seminal work on cities! She was the first one to consider cities as problems in organized complexity. So on top of being an activist, Jacobs was a visionary.
I could go on talking about cities as complex adaptive systems - but I'll stop here!
January 24, 2023
I read this to get a deeper understanding of the current research done in the field of cities as complex systems, after reading Scale by Geoffrey West, which is a more popular science account. In contrast, this book is thick with equations and math, which I confess to mostly skipping and reading the text which describes them as I only wanted to get an overview of the various topics.
It served well for that, and it is interesting how so many parameters of cities can be roughly described using simple equations derived from basic assumptions of growth, from urban form to economics and diversity, and the early attempts at creating such mathematical models. However, these trends are only obvious when aggregated from a large number of cities, and it is important to remember that they do not fully describe or predict any one given city, just the overall trend.
Knowing all this though, I wonder what the applications are — would the knowledge gained from these careful studies improve our current planning and administration of cities, or do they just allow us to compare various cities against their predicted performance?
It served well for that, and it is interesting how so many parameters of cities can be roughly described using simple equations derived from basic assumptions of growth, from urban form to economics and diversity, and the early attempts at creating such mathematical models. However, these trends are only obvious when aggregated from a large number of cities, and it is important to remember that they do not fully describe or predict any one given city, just the overall trend.
Knowing all this though, I wonder what the applications are — would the knowledge gained from these careful studies improve our current planning and administration of cities, or do they just allow us to compare various cities against their predicted performance?
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews