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

And then cities came as a little bit of a happenstance, a happy episode, actually, at the Santa Fe Institute, where people are looking at many different types of organization and complex systems.

And I had an interest in cities, particularly as places of innovation.

And we started looking at a bunch of quantities using scaling, which is a very simple technique.

And then we found all these interesting new things that people hadn't found before.

Yeah, you know, that's controversial.

But basically, so there's several ways to think about this.

There are people kind of structuralists, a bit like more in geography and social sciences that think about, oh, it's this boundary.

It's the administrative city or something.

Right.

But if you think more like I think from science and even from physics, it's sort of a bound state.

It's a place where people are interacting with each other, right?

And so that's also the modern definition that like the U.S.

Census uses.

So it's basically a definition of everybody that commutes to interact with each other.

So they include sort of central cities that we think of, you know, New York City, Manhattan, but that includes all the other parts of the city in which people are coming in and out and so on and interacting strongly.

And so there's sort of a, it's kind of a hazy cloud that forms the city as well as sort of a very dynamic fluid quantity.

And you can basically operationalize this idea through observing commuting flows and more recently even using cell phones and other things like this.

It's kind of a little bit more like, you know, the atmosphere of a place as well as its core.

Oh, that too is a little controversial because there were some settlements before that people would fight over if they were cities or not.

But, you know, something like there were certainly well-defined cities in today's Middle East, 4,000, 5,000 years before Christ.

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