"New York, just like I pictured it, skyscrapers and everything." (Image by Dennis Afraz.)

Neuroscientist Jonah Lehrer had an excellent article in the New York Times Magazine this weekend, about Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt, theoretical physicists who are applying their science training to urban problems. (By the way, if you’ve never read Lehrer’s book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, I highly recommend it). An excerpt:

“Along with Luis Bettencourt, another theoretical physicist who had abandoned conventional physics, and a team of disparate researchers, West began scouring libraries and government Web sites for relevant statistics. The scientists downloaded huge files from the Census Bureau, learned about the intricacies of German infrastructure and bought a thick and expensive almanac featuring the provincial cities of China. (Unfortunately, the book was in Mandarin.) They looked at a dizzying array of variables, from the total amount of electrical wire in Frankfurt to the number of college graduates in Boise. They amassed stats on gas stations and personal income, flu outbreaks and homicides, coffee shops and the walking speed of pedestrians.

"These are the laws, they say, that automatically emerge whenever people ‘agglomerate,’ cramming themselves into apartment buildings and subway cars." (Image by Rebecca Kennison.)

After two years of analysis, West and Bettencourt discovered that all of these urban variables could be described by a few exquisitely simple equations. For example, if they know the population of a metropolitan area in a given country, they can estimate, with approximately 85 percent accuracy, its average income and the dimensions of its sewer system. These are the laws, they say, that automatically emerge whenever people ‘agglomerate,’ cramming themselves into apartment buildings and subway cars. It doesn’t matter if the place is Manhattan or Manhattan, Kan.: the urban patterns remain the same. West isn’t shy about describing the magnitude of this accomplishment. ‘What we found are the constants that describe every city,’ he says. ‘I can take these laws and make precise predictions about the number of violent crimes and the surface area of roads in a city in Japan with 200,000 people. I don’t know anything about this city or even where it is or its history, but I can tell you all about it. And the reason I can do that is because every city is really the same.’ After a pause, as if reflecting on his hyperbole, West adds: ‘Look, we all know that every city is unique. That’s all we talk about when we talk about cities, those things that make New York different from L.A., or Tokyo different from Albuquerque. But focusing on those differences misses the point. Sure, there are differences, but different from what? We’ve found the what.'”