Urban Careers and the Twenty-Ninth Day

A helpful way for young math students to grasp the concept of exponential growth is to look at water lilies growing on a pond. They grow exponentially and double in area each day. If they will fully cover the pond by the 30^th day, on what day is the lake half covered? The twenty-ninth day[1].

This year I had the honor of teaching 4^th year energy systems students who will graduate later this month (their blogs on energy issues will be presented on this site over the summer). These graduates are particularly essential. During their careers they will be part of the world’s largest ever city-building spree. Their task will be to again double the world’s cities.

The Buzz of Cities

For bees, bigger hives are better. 

Last week researchers at the University of Arizona published their findings: bees of bigger hives have more information and forage better. With improved communications, bees from the bigger hives sent new foragers to known resources up to four hours earlier than bees from smaller hives.¹

This better communications also seems to work in bigger cities. Geoffrey West and the Santé Fe Institute provide impressive modeling on the scaling of cities. Double the size of a city and you get 1.15 times the growth of economy, patents and innovation. And as long as you can keep congestion and pollution in check, you can get this economic growth at only 0.85 times the cost of additional infrastructure. In other words, larger cities have a disproportionate impact on a country’s communications, and therefore a bigger impact on economy and culture.

One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish*

‘From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere!’
That one blue fish cost a million plus,¹ that one blue fish and all the fuss.

In cities here and cities there, you’d think by now we’d be aware.
That we’d take some care for what is rare. But here’s another to make you stare:

Soup can come with a shark’s fin; yes, so strange a fin that’s mixed right in.²
So much money is being spent, just how far can we go, and to what extent?

‘Say! What a lot of fish there are.’ Yet there they go near and far.
Tuna, sharks and even rhinos too; all sold in a city near you.

Save a fish, save a tiger, save an elephant or two. Here’s what a kid could do
Shout ‘Oh Mr. Mayor in that great big chair, is your city doing its fair share?’

Presidents, queens and kings. Treaties, conferences and other hopeful things.
Hunters, fishers, angry warring foes, and even NGOs.

From here to there, all of them can save that fish, and can keep it from the dish,
But none of them, yes, it’s true. Mr. Mayor none of them, as well as you.

From there to here, from here to there, boys and girls are everywhere
Please save our fish; it’s a simple wish. One fish, two fish, few fish, blue fish.

Hey Cities, Slow Down

‘Lord give me patience, but please hurry.’¹Everyone working with cities has probably felt this sentiment. We see the new buildings, read the reports, and know that the hurly burley rush to urbanize across the world is picking up speed – we are about to repeat the amount of city-building we did in the last 200 years, but this time we will do it in just 40 years. Surely we have no time to slow down.

Chaucer said it well in Canterbury Tales, ‘In wicked haste is not profit.’ Or as in the sage Chinese proverb, ‘A hasty man drinks his tea with a fork.’ Haste makes waste. In the rush to urbanize, we are in danger of wasting many opportunities within our cities, as we lock in little foibles and big mistakes.