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 both enabled, but it's also associated as an outcome with more choices and more access and better outputs.

So the condition of being isolated or segregated is associated always with poverty.

So we see this, right?

It's not abstract.

Yeah.

So that already is telling you something interesting, but that now is in distribution.

It's both structural, but then it's also functional in terms of what we said cities were for, which is that if you cannot realize the advantages of being in this place,

then you're just suffering the bad consequences, but not enjoying the benefits, right?

So that's kind of where cities fail.

And they fail both at the edges of people traveling very long times, but also inside the city when people don't have access to that network, are excluded for one reason or another.

And so there are all these ways in which this mechanism is failing, and this has consequences for individuals and for neighborhoods and for then the city as a whole as well, because this creates conflict and so on.

But what's interesting about cities is that, again, this pushes the system to work better.

Now it's a social mechanism by which people try to reduce poverty, increase inclusion, improve public services.

Of course, for anyone living in the city, you know this doesn't happen smoothly.

But over long periods of time, that has been what has been happening mostly.

Yeah, you know, so this is another thing that's important when we think from the point of view of the social sciences, right?

Because there are different modes of interaction.

And, you know, it's not like it's a homogeneous thing.

So, for example, you know,

If you've been to any city, you know that all those people are not your friends, right?

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