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Cited by 2,699Regional Economics and Spatial AnalysisGlobal Urban Networks and DynamicsUrban Design and Spatial Analysis

Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities

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Bettencourt, Luís M. A., Lobo, José, Helbing, Dirk, Kühnert, Christian, West, Geoffrey B.·2007·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
DOI 10.1073/pnas.0610172104PMC PMC1852329
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Abstract

Humanity has just crossed a major landmark in its history with the majority of people now living in cities. Cities have long been known to be society's predominant engine of innovation and wealth creation, yet they are also its main source of crime, pollution, and disease. The inexorable trend toward urbanization worldwide presents an urgent challenge for developing a predictive, quantitative theory of urban organization and sustainable development. Here we present empirical evidence indicating that the processes relating urbanization to economic development and knowledge creation are very general, being shared by all cities belonging to the same urban system and sustained across different nations and times. Many diverse properties of cities from patent production and personal income to electrical cable length are shown to be power law functions of population size with scaling exponents, β, that fall into distinct universality classes. Quantities reflecting wealth creation and innovation have β ≈1.2 >1 (increasing returns), whereas those accounting for infrastructure display β ≈0.8 <1 (economies of scale). We predict that the pace of social life in the city increases with population size, in quantitative agreement with data, and we discuss how cities are similar to, and differ from, biological organisms, for which β<1. Finally, we explore possible consequences of these scaling relations by deriving growth equations, which quantify the dramatic difference between growth fueled by innovation versus that driven by economies of scale. This difference suggests that, as population grows, major innovation cycles must be generated at a continually accelerating rate to sustain growth and avoid stagnation or collapse.

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  • The evolution of social and economic life in cities increases with population size: wages, income, gross domestic product and bank deposits scale superlinearly, over different years and nations, with statistically consistent exponents.

    “The evolution of social and economic life in cities increases with population size: wages, income, gross domestic product and bank deposits scale super linearly, over different years and nations, with statistically consistent exponents (Bettencourt et al. 2007;Andersson et al. 2006;Florida 2004;Barabasi and Albert 1999).”

    From A Network Approach to Link Visibility and Urban Activity Location (2018) · cites this paper as Bettencourt et al. 2007

  • Concentrating human populations within cities transforms the economies of scale in human interactions, producing higher average incomes and enabling a wide array of novel social benefits as urban systems advance, which in turn enable further growth and help to drive rural-urban migration.

    “Concentrating human populations within cities transforms the economies of scale in human interactions, producing higher average incomes and enabling a wide array of novel social benefits as urban systems advance (98, 99), which in turn enable further growth and help to drive rural–urban migration (100, 101).”

    From Used planet: a global history (2013) · cites this paper as [98]

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Authors
Bettencourt, L. M. A., Lobo, J., Helbing, D., Kühnert, C., & West, G. B.
Affiliations
  • Los Alamos National Laboratory (US)
  • Arizona State University (US)
  • Technische Universität Dresden (DE)
  • Santa Fe Institute (US)
ORCID
Venue
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Publisher
National Academy of Sciences
Published
2007-04-24
Volume
104
Issue
17
Pages
7301-7306
ISSN
  • 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
  • 1091-6490
DOI
10.1073/pnas.0610172104
PMC
PMC1852329
OpenAlex
W2161291053
Cited by
2,699
References
48
Citations by year
2026: 167 · 2025: 169 · 2024: 175 · 2023: 166 · 2022: 192 · 2021: 263 · 2020: 198 · 2019: 198 · 2018: 220 · 2017: 148 · 2016: 178 · 2015: 159 · 2014: 136 · 2013: 89 · 2012: 81
FWCI
82.24
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Regional Economics and Spatial Analysis
  • Social Sciences › Urban Studies › Global Urban Networks and Dynamics
  • Physical Sciences › Engineering › Building and Construction › Urban Design and Spatial Analysis
Keywords
urban scaling, urbanization, power law, innovation, knowledge production, economic growth, economies of scale, increasing returns, urban infrastructure, urban metabolism, urban sustainability, innovation cycle
MeSH terms
Cities, Human Activities, Life Style, Urbanization

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