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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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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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

But it kind of, there's sort of this instability that's there that you see, you know, with hindsight develop, but really comes to the fore in large cities where you really see that, you know, at work and all the amazing things that come out of it, but also some of the problems of society that come from it.

But that's basically why cities exist.

So that's why they create this interdependence of different roles.

And this turns out to be very productive and very creative.

That's exactly right.

And this is, I think, that's almost a good definition of complex systems, and I think opens up more this idea that it happens gradually.

It doesn't happen just structurally.

Right.

Right?

So, and again, through human history, you'd see societies, obviously, where that happens less.

It happens a little bit in human societies from the beginning, but it happens much less than in modern societies and cities.

But that process, therefore, needs explanation and has a mechanism.

Right.

And so that's where this becomes really interesting.

And that really is a better way to start thinking about cities and opens up a whole scope of thinking about not only human societies, but also then complex systems, as you said.

So this is where it becomes really interesting to me.

And that's why I really stick with it.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, I think of the things we know about, it's the most extreme complex system, the most complex complex system, complex square.

Exactly as you say, you know, it has brains, it has organisms, it has ecosystems, it has infrastructural systems, it has design at play, it has human institutions, and all these things are interplaying with each other, right?

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