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

times some factor that has to do with shape.

Okay, this is just basic cross-sectional behavior for the physicist, but that's the way it looks.

So if you now equate these two things, you say, well, these interactions must be net positive because this thing is here.

So if it were terrible, people wouldn't be here.

So you say, well, so there's basically a factor proportional to this, the n over 8, and this must equal something that goes like the radius, which is area to the 1⁄2.

So if you kind of do the factors of area, you get that area goes like the population to the two-thirds.

Okay.

You just have the area, there's a one-half plus one, and then you put it on the other side, there's a three-halves, put it on the other side, you get two-thirds.

Exactly.

Very important.

So, you know, and this is kind of something that in practice people discuss, because often when cities become very big and very expensive, people commute for two hours.

But that's kind of, that's basically the...

If you want to say it's the limit of the bound state, right?

It's the escape clause that at some point is not worth it anymore.

So when you do these whole calculations, there are several ways in which a city can fail, which is precisely that if moving around becomes too expensive, then it kind of becomes balkanized, right?

A bit like LA, that you cannot travel across LA anymore so much, but you become sort of more local.

Yeah.

So that happens a lot of cities that are very undense, like maybe sprawling in Florida or something.

So that does happen.

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