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 it looks like a city because it's continuous build, but as an interaction system, it may not work that way.

But then you also can have the opposite, which is that the city becomes so dense, they jams.

So that's more characteristic of cities that are developing that don't have yet the infrastructure that allows the highways and the subways that allow you essentially to tunnel.

So this is where you go from one third.

So that's the two thirds for the area.

And then if you ask again, that density, N over A, now goes like basically one-third, and the total interaction is N times N over A goes like four-thirds.

So that's now superlinear.

That's the amount of interactions realizable in this space.

Now, if you think about what happened from where I started, you just have a bunch of houses, and they're getting denser by these equations if you increase the population.

So this system is going to jam.

It will have a limitation at some point when it does hit the size of the buildings and the space in between and so on.

So that cannot be a solution that, by the way, these kinds of systems do exist and we measure them in archeology, very small towns.

But then as the city gets larger, it needs to start channeling movement.

So you need to basically creating streets, we call them streets, right?

Or subways or pipes, but places of movements need to be dedicated.

Otherwise, the system jams.

And this gives you a different exponent.

It works a bit more like a parallel circuit where you now have different routes.

Okay.

But you need also to build a hierarchical system.

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