dbaboci

Could you elaborate why the quote you mention is a faux pas. I think from the evolution / morphogenesis perspective he describes how constraints (i.e. gravitational, energetic) shape and direct the space state. Lewontin (also affiliated with Santa Fe) goes a bit further here on that I think: http://www.accuracyingenesis.com/evolution/complications.htm

I read the review and agree with some of what Aaron is saying. But the book is meant to appeal to a general audience. West's research is well represented in peer-reviewed journals, where most of his concerns are properly addressed (example: https://www.pnas.org/content/104/17/7301).

Maybe should have clarified in text: the "very interesting..." bit doesn't come from the author. It's just something that sounded off to me.

Even adding the Moon or the Great Pyramid would still leave a large gap in between. Which is totally normal, does not suggest anything weird. It just feels like a vacuum (that might be filled with huge spaceships in sci-fi futures:)

I think the research in the field is fairly limited - which might make the book sound limited, but I didn't really see any picking of cherries, rather than very few cherries to pick from :).

Also West makes it pretty clear what he thinks of a bare exponential & corollary phase transition. The scaling power-law relationship however does not imply any sort of bare exponential growth.

Hehehe true. The graph is from the book, it might be mislabeled. I think it represents the change from average walking speed (which is 1.3 - 1.8 meters / second)

From my perspective the point of the book is to shed light on some of these macro trends that are not typically intuitive. So we expect walking speed to be random, but it is driven by the population of a city. So a lot of decisions in business or urban planning for example could learn a lot by knowing these macro trends (West has been one of the first to explore how these trends relate to scaling)

Alain Bertaud addresses cities as labor markets in Order Without Design. A talk a bit about it here: https://thinkthinkthink.substack.com/p/the-15-minute-city-th...

Most importantly however cities serve as highly efficient labor markets - they connect a varied and interdependent labor force to diverse work opportunities. Most of commuting and corollary congestion happens at rush hour: the time when people travel from home to work and vice versa. In the above diagram from Order Without Design, Marie-Agnes & Alain Bertaud skillfully illustrates the key connection between home, work/entertainment and speed of travel. The 15-minute city should attempt to minimize inconvenient & needless travel, while offering speedy access to jobs and amenities regardless of the place of residence. The traditional central business district is somewhat efficient in this sense; polycentric planning needs to figure out how it can keep the efficiencies of a central business district while offering the comfort of a walkable neighborhood. Even if all super-creatives work from home, that still leaves 88% of the labor force which needs to move around. Swift mobility will be a key aspect of urban living for the foreseeable future and a crucial determinant to the success of polycentric cities.

heh, reminded me of these big beautiful boxes CD games used to come in.