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

Let me just try to say that without... I hope I won't say anything that...

is insensitive.

One point that's interesting is that just in the last Sustainable Development Goals, which is 2015, there was this agreement that says we're going to end poverty.

Worldwide, forever.

Why did this happen?

Why were we confident that this was happening?

First, you know, there was less poverty, but a lot of what is happening in the background was the urbanization and economic development of East Asia, which took more than half a billion people out of poverty quickly in one generation.

So there's this sense, which is a broad sense, of development and poverty.

So one of the things I'm studying now is, if you will, cities as engines of what we call social development or socioeconomic development in society.

So we never have a society that develops without urbanizing.

Never.

Um, so, but cities, as you then point out at a different scale, let's now go a different scale and look inside a city, right?

Then you do see indeed greater, uh, typically greater inequality because you have very rich people, right?

In a lot of cities, we also have poor people.

And, and therefore this seems to show that in some sense, the situation perhaps got worse, right?

And there are certainly episodes where that is true, particularly episodes where people are poor and excluded and therefore don't have the ability or the support to improve their own living conditions.

So this does happen for sure.

But there's also a sense in which...

the way poverty happens in cities, it's kind of another interesting thing that cities tends to have a lot of poor people.

And when this has been studied in detail, it's not only people that have been there a long time, but it's also people who come.

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