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

It's just basically something else.

It's kind of this appetite for speed and diversity and possibility that seems to happen in cities.

So again, it's something that's hard to quantify very well.

And I think it appeals to different people at different times.

Large cities are particularly attractive, modern cities, cities that we experience today, are particularly attractive to some people and not others.

So this starts answering the question a little bit in a more personal way.

So larger cities tend to be very attractive to people that are young, young adults who are more educated.

So this goes a little bit what I was saying, because you're prepared to maybe take better advantage of what is there in a city.

But you also need to develop what you've learned, perhaps into a network of people, into a work experience, into something where you can have choice.

Other demographic that's particularly attracted to large cities are foreign migrants.

So this is kind of topical right now, but it's interesting.

This seems to be quite universal.

So we think this is because large cities have many different pockets of culture, including a little bit of people from their own point of origin, but also other people that are not necessarily a homogeneous culture, and they're therefore culturally more places to connect.

Mm-hmm.

towards realizing then structurally what we perceive as division of labor and division of knowledge, but really what is the process of self-expression and perhaps trying to improve your life in some sense.

Yeah, that's right.

And of course, it's not a sure thing.

It's sort of an exploration thing.

And so the other thing that cities allow you to do that go to this fact that we discussed more fundamentally just a little bit a while ago about them being more open-ended is that if it doesn't work out, you can go away again and go somewhere else.

Whereas, you know, the cell in the organism can't quite do that, right?

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