Geoffrey West

I spent most of my career doing high-energy physics, quarks, dark matter, string theory and so on.

— Geoffrey West

Your cells are not working as hard as your dog's but harder than your horse's. The bigger the animal, the less energy…

— Geoffrey West

“While exponential growth is a remarkable manifestation of our extraordinary accomplishments as a species, built into it are the potential seeds of…

— Geoffrey West

One of the remarkable things about slums is that they do develop their own social organization and economy and even culture that…

— Geoffrey West

“The system we have evolved critically relies on people continually wanting new cars and new cell phones, new widgets and gadgets, new…

— Geoffrey West

“Cities are sustained by similar network systems such as roads, railways, and electrical lines that transport people, energy, and resources and whose…

— Geoffrey West

When you look at a city, you know, it looks so unique. You feel this kind of uniqueness, you know, and especially…

— Geoffrey West

“It’s extremely difficult to kill a city! On”

— Geoffrey West

“Perhaps, then, the most surprising consequence of a visionary Theory of Everything is that it implies that on the grand scale the…

— Geoffrey West

“It is all too often forgotten that the whole point of a city is to bring people together, to facilitate interaction, and…

— Geoffrey West

“The integration of these two kinds of networks, namely, the requirement that socioeconomic interaction represented by space-filling fractal-like social networks must be…

— Geoffrey West

“So why do almost all cities remain viable, whereas the vast majority of companies and organisms die?”

— Geoffrey West

“The existence of these remarkable regularities strongly suggests that there is a common conceptual framework underlying all of these very different highly…

— Geoffrey West

“Unfortunately, however, there is another serious catch. Theory dictates that such discoveries must occur at an increasingly accelerating pace; the time between…

— Geoffrey West

Exciting cities stay exciting, and boring cities stay boring.

— Geoffrey West

“Thus, to avoid collapse a new innovation must be initiated that resets the clock, allowing growth to continue and the impending singularity…

— Geoffrey West

“So in marked contrast to infrastructure, which scales sublinearly with population size, socioeconomic quantities—the very essence of a city—scale superlinearly, thereby manifesting…

— Geoffrey West

The bigger the city is, the less infrastructure you need per capita.

— Geoffrey West

“A major shock at the wrong time can lead to their demise. Younger companies, which are buffered against this by an initial…

— Geoffrey West

“The mechanisms that have traditionally been suggested for understanding companies can be divided into three broad categories: transaction costs, organizational structure, and…

— Geoffrey West

“The proportionality constant is 21.6, meaning that there is approximately one establishment for about every 22 people in a city, regardless of…

— Geoffrey West

It's hard to kill a city, but easy to kill a company.

— Geoffrey West

“TOWARD A SCIENCE OF CITIES”

— Geoffrey West

“Ants brilliantly self-organized to evolve remarkably robust and hugely successful and sophisticated physical and social structures, but it took them millions of…

— Geoffrey West

“Many of the most interesting phenomena that we have touched upon fall into this category, including the occurrence of disasters such as…

— Geoffrey West