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

So I hope that we can visualize this.

But suppose you have a city that's not like such a complicated city.

It just has a bunch of houses over space, and they're kind of scattered.

But you can define more or less a place.

We put a circle around it, right?

So we put always a spherical city, right?

Not spherical, a circle of city in this case.

By the way, economists and geographers do this in order to create models.

So this is not just physicists.

So you have a certain characteristic size for what that city is.

So you can define a radius.

Okay.

So now you can say two things.

You can say basically that travel around the city, if you go to visit your neighbors and so on, or maybe you live somewhere and want to go to the center of town, is more or less proportioned to the radius.

So there's a cost of moving, and that cost is proportioned to this radius.

Okay.

On the other hand, if you move through this space, there's a certain probability you meet someone.

And this is kind of basically, or even if you come to the center, it's similar, it just has a different geometric factor.

So basically, the rate of interaction is proportioned to the density, which is the population divided by the area.

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