Luís M. A. Bettencourt

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816 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 27 Jul

Luís M. A. Bettencourt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas · 362 | Luis Bettencourt on the Universal Properties of Self-Organizing Cities · 27 Jul 2026 podcast

You know, these numbers actually, let me just say where these numbers come from.

So this...

16% or something.

When you think about scaling, I'm going to take a step back and then try to answer with the data.

But just take a step back.

First, you need to understand where these things come from.

When you think about scaling, scaling is like, so we're talking about, in some sense, we're talking about a city as a bunch of interactions that can fit into a physical space over time.

In time, we're imagining that every day is a little bit the same for now.

Of course, over long times, that changes.

But so there are two things going on.

And scaling is all about essentially one thing inside another.

And the dimensions of these two things having

to become commensurate.

So what's happening here in a city is that you have a social network that to begin with, it could be anything.

It could have any degree and so on, and to some extent has a lot of variety.

But on large scales, it depends on the built spaces of the city.

And so you're fitting these interactions into space.

So this depends on the dimension of space, which this 16 comes from the space being essentially two-dimensional.

Okay.

And it comes from people traveling in ways that basically have to do with visiting a few places.

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