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

You're building, in the modern world, a career, but also your social life and so on.

And so it's the people that feel, as you just said, it's not everybody, but it's the people that feel they want to try it, give it a try.

then often you migrate, intend to migrate to a city in this.

And then if it doesn't work out, you see, in the modern world, people are going back and forth a lot.

So you see this in COVID, there was all this.

So it's not like people come and are stuck.

That can happen, but it's rare.

But people can try it out and go to another city or go to a small place again and so on.

So we did, once upon a time, a very interesting study.

It was a bit anecdotal, but we had the cell phones of people that were migrating to rural areas and cities in Kenya.

And so we could see who they were calling.

And so we could see that the people that got from the rural area to the city and they were calling people in the city, they were predictably going to stay.

But the people that are still calling their moms back home were going to go back.

So, you know, sort of an element of selection experimentation.

This is not to say – so there's a lot going on, but the fact that –

that it works for a lot of people means then that we see this macro phenomenon that cities grow and that takes, that phenomenon takes a life of its own.

But also what it does is to create this demographic imbalance where cities remain younger with people that are more motivated,

who are more on the make, and then that is missing, sometimes from the rural area, particularly at times of strong migration.

So there's sort of a whole bigger demographic picture that's interesting as well, but it has to do with sort of what happens across the urban hierarchy, as we say, sort of euphemistically, but also has to do now, this becomes important with problems also of population decrease and so on.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

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