The "urban scaling" research of Geoffrey West, Luis Bettencourt, Jose Lobo, Deborah Strumsky, Dirk Helbing and Christian Kuhnert on cities has attracted considerable attention (references below). They have provided strong quantitative evidence, based upon voluminous econometric analysis that cities tend to become more efficient as they grow in population.
Specifically, West, a theoretical physicist, and his team show that measures such as gross domestic product per capita and income per capita rise, on average, 15 percent with each doubling of city population. They draw parallels with the animal kingdom, noting that larger animals tend to be more efficient than smaller ones, and comparing elephants, efficient because of their size, to cities.
This is all very attractive, especially the elephant analogy, which appropriately suggests that cities are organisms.
The Urban Organism
Yet the research has been widely reported to suggest that density as opposed to size is the key to urban productivity. West et al look at cities as "integrated economic and social units," at the "level of metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs); in the European Union, larger urban zones (LUZs); and in China, urban administrative units." This is the economic, or functional manifestation of the urban organism (the urban area, the area of continuous urbanization, is the physical manifestation). In so doing, West, et al demonstrate a familiarity with urban geography that is all too rare, even among analysts who have studied cities for far longer.
The key issue here is what constitutes a “city”. New York is a good, example, as headquarters to the national media, a world class city and as urban as it gets in the United States. But the New York metropolitan area, the "integrated economic and social unit" is not Manhattan or even five boroughs. It stretches from a bit west of Blooming Grove Township, in Pike County 25 miles west of Port Jervis, a city 90 miles from Manhattan located in western Orange County, NY, to Montauk Point in Suffolk County and from north of West Point, in Putnam County to Egg Harbor Township, in Ocean County, New Jersey (that's nearly 30 miles south of Toms River). Suffice it to say most of this vast region is not dense at all.
Divining Density
Yet, some analysts have characterized the West, et al research as being about higher densities, Richard Florida wrote in The Wall Street Journal:
Researchers at the Santa Fe Institute have been able to demonstrate that bigger, denser cities literally speed up the metabolism of daily life.
That's only half right. The research was about city size, not density, as the authors indicate (below).
All too typical of the way that suburbanized America is disparaged by the media, Jonah Lehrer, of The New York Times sputtered that:
In recent decades, though, many of the fastest-growing cities in America, like Phoenix and Riverside, Calif., have given us a very different urban model. These places have traded away public spaces for affordable single-family homes, attracting working-class families who want their own white picket fences.
In reality, the kind of suburbs found in Phoenix and Riverside-San Bernardino will be found surrounding every one of the nation's core cities, including New York, an urban area that covers more land area than any urban area in the world at 3,450 square miles (8,935 square kilometers), according to the Census Bureau. That’s twice the expanse of the Los Angeles urban area. Granted, New York's Hudson Valley suburbs are greener and more affluent than most in Phoenix, but their population density is nearly the same. Moreover, neither Phoenix nor New York (think Staten Island or much of Long Island) should be ashamed of attracting "working class families who want their own white picket fences." Why demean aspiration?
Urban blogger James Withow refers to their "remarkable findings" that "raise interesting policy issues on density." Another analyst wrote "West offers data that shows cities create economies of scale that suburbs and small towns cannot match." This is patently absurd since, as noted above, West did not study any part of the urban organism below the metropolitan area. There was no attempt to make a distinction between the productivity of say, Manhattan or Brooklyn, to White Plains or even Blooming Spring Township. No core city or suburb is an "integrated economic and social unit."
West et al on Density
Indeed, West et al make it very clear that their findings have nothing to do with urban population density. They tested for correlations population growth and income, patents and violent crimes, and found "no significant trend exists between residuals for income, patents and violent crime and population growth or density." They further note their equations showed an "R2 consistent with zero" (in every day English, that means they found no relationship between density and the other variables).
This conclusion was correct, though comparing metropolitan area densities is less than ideal. Just to check, we reran the equations with urban density data and found that this approach too produced an "R2 consistent with zero," not only for income, patents and violent crimes, but also gross metropolitan product.
West et al pointed out that:
The shape of the city in space, including for example its residential density, matter much less than (and are mostly accounted for by) population size in predicting indicators of urban performance. Said more explicitly, whether a city looks more like New York or Boston or instead like Los Angeles or Atlanta has a vanishing effect in predicting its socio-economic performance. (emphasis by author)
In other words, the same improvement in urban performance would be predicted from doubling the population of Atlanta, with an urban density of 1,700 per square mile (700 per square kilometer) as in New York, with more than three times Atlanta's density or Los Angeles' with more than four (Los Angeles is highest density large urban area in the United States).
It turns out – counter the misunderstandings of some urbanists – that higher or lower density simply does not matter according to the West, et al research.
It's About Density Thresholds and Efficient Labor Markets
Cities (integrated economic and social units) are created by reaching urban density thresholds. They tend to become more productive as they grow, so long as they are not too large to function as a labor market. Density doesn't matter particularly. Indeed, the general tendency is for cities to become more dispersed (less dense) as they grow, as indicated by longer term data in the US, Canada and around the world.
For example, the Seattle and Houston urban areas have population densities much lower than those of Paris, London, Hong Kong and even Los Angeles – yet they still rank higher among the most productive metropolitan areas in the world, according to the Brookings Institution Global Metropolitan Monitor 2011. Brookings rates Hartford as the most productive metropolitan area in the world, yet its urban population density is nearly as low as Atlanta's.
Finally, the Brookings list excludes the world's most dense major city, Dhaka. That's because the economic output of its 15 million people is insufficient to make a list that includes cities one-tenth its size. Dhaka combines the highest population density in the world with perhaps the lowest per capita economic output of any megacity in the world.
Allowing Organisms to Grow
As West et al suggests, cities, like elephants, are organisms. Both expand (dare we say "sprawl") as they grow. This should be cause for concern, given planning dictates that would restrain urban organism, such as urban growth boundaries. These restraints are akin to depriving a large mammal of sufficient space to roam and feed. That's no way to treat a productive organism, or a great city.
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Reference Materials:
Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities
Urban Scaling and Its Deviations: Revealing the Structure of Wealth, Innovation and Crime across Cities
2010 US Urban Area Data
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African Bush Elephant photo by flickr user nickandmel2006.
Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.”
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I also think big citites
I also think big citites (not dense, as such) can be more efficient than small towns simply because you have less redundant labour. I think small operations have staff twiddling their thumbs more often, whereas big operations tend to have everyone working solidly because you can more easily cut staff in and out when required or not. And so you get better utilisation of capital, too, and especially so if you engineer local over-population which drives people to run your machine into the painful hours of the night (via the intense threat of unemployment). The latter is what New Zealand does; New Zealand is a country slowly rotting into third world status because the mindful people don't fight for it, they just flee to Australia. And I'm not blaming them.
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Thanks for discussing our research - some comments
Thanks for covering our work Wendell.
Your characterization of our results is quite fair, but let me just add a few qualifications and comments that may be illuminating to the readers interested in these issues.
Our work indeed has been mostly about how population size of integrated urban areas (e.g. metropolitan areas) affects their characteristics, including measures of economic performance, innovation, crime, etc. Ultimately we want to understand what cities are, in their most essential aspects, as human social networks co-located in space and time and subject to certain efficiency constraints.
The issue of population density is fascinating because it is inevitably entangled with the issue of city population size and with urban productivity. Looking at cities of roughly the same type (with similar transportation technology and geographic constraints) at the same time we always see that larger cities are denser. On the other hand, as Wendell rightly observes, the tendency over (recent) time has been for cities to become less dense, and this trend is closely associated with (but is not the cause of) economic development. We see these dynamics all around us with the growth of suburban areas in US metropolitan areas, outside old European cities and in fast urbanizing nations, e.g. in Bangalore, India.
What seems to be the case worldwide and through time is that, for cities to exist, their spatial density profile must allow movement of people, energy, materials and information across the city sufficiently quickly and cheaply.
This can be achieved in many different ways. Think of Venice in the 13th century with its canals, or of a dense transit city like Tokyo, or indeed of the less dense contemporary car cities of North America. The difference between these radically distinct spatial urban forms is that less dense places are spatially larger and rely on faster transportation, which must be available to all, to fulfill their primary socioeconomic functions. As Andrew pointed out access is most important, and this can be achieved in different ways in different circumstances.
To these general considerations there are two other observations that should also be kept in mind: Given an opportunity people seem to enjoy more space at home and their choices of transportation depend on density and wealth.
As cities and nations grow economically, people seem to prefer to have more space at home, helping explain, perhaps, the rise of suburbia and the general trend towards decreasing urban densities over time worldwide. This is a controversial issue among urban planners, who are often interested in urban design that integrates many functions spatially and that therefore may encourage higher residential densities. Depending on this integration of services and on the cost of land and transportation, different detailed spatial forms tend to emerge. They all reflect tradeoffs between having space at home and access to the cities many functions.
On the other hand a lower density city that depends on the car, at its present level of technology, will consume more energy in transportation and consequently emit more CO2 than a denser city relying on an energy efficient transit system. Much of the energy savings that are possible in larger cities hinge on the use of transportation modes that consume less energy per capita per distance travelled, such as walking. While cities are not built primarily to save energy, this may become an important strategic issue both environmentally and in terms of economic security.
The analogy with biological organisms in these respects is not very helpful. Although the roads and cables of cities look a bit like our vascular system they behave very differently. Cities that are large – like the elephant in the picture– act more like mice and vice-versa. That is, large cities are fast, not slow and ponderous, and they are not dominated by network constraints that force them to slow down with size. The presence of more people that can in principle be reached accelerates socio-economic rates, including their economic output. This is much like what happens to your inbox or your blog page: the more people you reach the busier you’ll be dealing with their replies, comments, etc.
From all this, the conclusion is that cities can exist in many different spatial forms, and specifically at lower or higher densities, provided that people can interact easily. Given the same level of transportation technology larger cities will be denser. Given faster transportation cities will deflate and become spatially more spread-out. Nevertheless the level of social interactions on the average may be preserved across these changes, and sometimes even expanded by new technologies. Measuring the density of social interactions in cities (which are very different from residential density) remains an interesting and open research problem.
Several of these interesting issues are addressed in a few future publications from our group that are presently in review and will appear over the next few months.
Finally, we do not call ourselves "West’s team" or "West et al". We are a group of independent researchers interested in understanding cities more quantitatively across their many social, economic, infrastructural and spatial dimensions.
The authorship order in each of our papers reflects credit on the work, both in terms of its analytic and conceptual development. We sometimes call ourselves the "Santa Fe Institute Urban Scaling Group" or Cities Group, but that also excludes some of our most important external collaborators, such as Prof. José Lobo (Arizona State University) - who among us first measured the scaling of the economic productivity of cities - or Prof. Deborah Strumsky (University of North Carolina, Charlotte) who, along with José, is responsible for many of our insights on technological innovation in cities. Lack of accuracy in referring to our work affects our ability to do our research, including career and funding opportunities and to collaborate with each other. We thank you in advance for the extra effort involved in citing the work accurately in the future.
Please visit our project's webpage for more details.
Given the same level of
Given the same level of transportation technology larger cities will be denser. Given faster transportation cities will deflate and become spatially more spread-out.www warehouse direct
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The principal urban area is the urban area within a metropolitan area that has the largest population. For example, in the Riverside-San Bernardino metropolitan area, the Riverside-San Bernardino urban area is the principal urban area. Other urban areas, such as Murrietta, Hemet and Indio (Palm Springs) would be secondary urban areas.advertising online free
Density or Access?
Some thoughts:
Looking at our cities as an "economic machine" we can it's not about density, but access. High-density citites, with their congested stop-and-go transport, do not on average provide superior integration in terms of access - actually a bit less so, generally. The principle is obvious enough so we should forget density and just stick to the access question.
And access-integration is a value that changes all depending on what you're producing exactly. Economies of scale have radically different optimum points depending on the function, especially with the Internet, and cities can too easily evolve to the functions that best suit them.
I also think big citites (not dense, as such) can be more efficient than small towns simply because you have less redundant labour. I think small operations have staff twiddling their thumbs more often, whereas big operations tend to have everyone working solidly because you can more easily cut staff in and out when required or not. And so you get better utilisation of capital, too, and especially so if you engineer local over-population which drives people to run your machine into the painful hours of the night (via the intense threat of unemployment). The latter is what New Zealand does; New Zealand is a country slowly rotting into third world status because the mindful people don't fight for it, they just flee to Australia. And I'm not blaming them.
Urban Economic Scaling
That economies of cities depend on issues independent of density hardly argues for suburban sprawl as a superior form of urbanity. So long as density does not correlate with lowered productivity (except to the extent that a dense city may be "specialized", and historically limited in its range of economic generators), higher densities provide the more sustainable and convenient habitat, and always have. It might be noted that suburbia means houses, with high-density nodes of activity scattered among the more generalized residential sprawl. Hence, commercial, retail, and industrial enclaves need not be counted in the spectrum of "suburban" features as economic generators superior to equivalent enclaves in a more dense urban environment. It's about design, design, design in preference to zoning. If we are to consider the economic contributions of suburbia, we must also count all the negatives, over-extended infrastructure being perhaps the most salient. How one correlates L.A.s wealth with sprawl ignores the negative effects of hither and yon automobile transit which takes the suburbanite to all points of the compass in search of a living.
Wendell, the case is even stronger than you are saying
In the case of the UK economy, academic findings since the McKinsey Institute's 1998 study "Driving Productivity and Growth in the UK Economy", have been confirming that the UK's productivity has been, and is being REDUCED by its "growth constraint" urban planning. It is something like 20% to 40% LOWER because of this. Alan W. Evans' 2 books published in 2004 are outstanding. The Spatial Economics Research Centre at the London School of Economics is steadily producing new papers relating to this.
I don't know when the mainstream planning and economics professions are going to wake up to all this. As Alan W. Evans says:
"....the planning system has had a significant economic impact on the UK economy since it came into effect 50 years ago, and that as a result the British GNP per capita is lower than it would otherwise have been......This negative impact is not usually noted by economists seeking reasons for the low rate of growth of the British economy, but that is because few economists have any interest whatsoever in planning. Their whole training leads them to ignore matters related to land and location, so they tend to consider only those factors conventionally considered "economic" - investment, training, labour relations, management, etc. But since the planning system is designed to restrain physical development, it would be strange indeed if it did not restrain economic development as well...."
It is not hard to see the same effects occurring in California and Australia and everywhere else that urban growth constraints are strangling the urban economy (which happens to be the most important part of the economy, period).
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