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

That's what you'd expect.

But then the spatial part is just telling you the density part, that actually there's less space per capita,

And there's more interactions per capita.

And so these things have to go together.

It's just if you've done any calculation about a cross-section and somebody moving through a medium, that's exactly the math.

If you go through a city, there are more people to interact with, more businesses, because it's denser.

And the amount by which it's denser is the rate at which the number of interactions per unit time increase.

So that's basically the effect.

So what is a city?

So what is magical is that these things kind of go together in such a way that the cost benefits.

So the cost of moving around this infrastructure and the benefits of making this amount of money are exactly sort of compensating so that you can keep on having larger and larger cities that are ever faster and more expensive, but at the same time have more supportive infrastructure of just the right amount.

This doesn't always happen in time.

We know when we have a crisis, when that, you know.

when the highway closes or whatever.

But sort of, again, it tends to happen when you compare cities over large periods of time.

So it's kind of this amazing thing that humans invented.

I call it a social accelerator, a bit like a physics accelerator.