Re:Let’s Build a Future Without Cars
by jseliger on Saturday April 21, 2012 @01:45PM
(#3872365)
If you're curious about this stuff, see Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City, Matt Yglesias's The Rent is Too Damn High, and Ryan Avent's The Gated City, all of which discuss contemporary urban life and how restrictions on building height lead to suburban sprawl. In particular, based on their readings, I'm not sure this is true: "There are significant diseconomies involved in making a big dense city." Some parts of cities scale sub-linearly and others don't; see here: http://www.creativeclass.com/_v3/creative_class/2007/05/26/c...:
Quantities related to a city’s infrastructure, such as the number of gas stations and the length of paved roads, did scale "sublinearly", meaning that the larger the city, the less of these were required per capita. But measures of economic output and innovation – the number of patents, total wages, GDP, even the pace of walking – scaled "superlinearly", showing increasing returns with size (see Graphs). "The scaling laws say that on average, as a city grows you can predict its output and input, its energy consumption, its wealth creation, its level of crime," says Bettencourt.
Quantities related to a city’s infrastructure, such as the number of gas stations and the length of paved roads, did scale "sublinearly", meaning that the larger the city, the less of these were required per capita. But measures of economic output and innovation – the number of patents, total wages, GDP, even the pace of walking – scaled "superlinearly", showing increasing returns with size (see Graphs). "The scaling laws say that on average, as a city grows you can predict its output and input, its energy consumption, its wealth creation, its level of crime," says Bettencourt.