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Geoffrey B. West: The Universal Laws of Growth and Pace

Long Now

CHAPTER

The Universality of Social Interactions

If you double the size of a city in any given urban system, income, wealth, patents, educational institutions, creative people, police, aids, flu cases, crime, whatever, all of them increase to the same degree by approximately 15%. You save approximately 15% on all infrastructure. This is no doubt one of the fundamental reasons why cities continue to be attractive and why we have this phenomenon of megacities. We're very good at repressing the negative, the fact that there's more crime, more disease in a bigger city. Bigger cities in general are better in terms of many of these metrics.

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