Geoffrey West Quotes

• You could not have evolved a complex system like a city or an organism - with an enormous number of components - without the emergence of laws that constrain their behavior in order for them to be resilient.

  Geoffrey West

  Order, Law, Cities

  "The Sameness of Organisms, Cities, and Corporations". Interview with Ben Lillie, blog.ted.com. July 26, 2011.

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• When people come together, they become much more productive.

  Geoffrey West

  People, Together, Productive

  "The Physicist Turns the City" by Jonah Lehrer, www.nytimes.com. December 17, 2010.

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• We form cities in order to enhance interaction, to facilitate growth, wealth creation, ideas, innovation, but in so doing, we create from - from a physicist's viewpoint, entropy, meaning all of those bad things that we feel are engulfing us.

  Geoffrey West

  Order, Cities, Ideas

  "What Does Nature Teach Us About Cities?". "TED Radio Hour" with Alison Stewart, www.npr.org. June 11, 2012.

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• Cities tolerate crazy people. Companies don't.

  Geoffrey West

  Crazy, Cities, People

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• One of the remarkable things about slums is that they do develop their own social organization and economy and even culture that is, on some level, functional and in some cases, remarkably resilient. This is kind of amazing.

  Geoffrey West

  Organization, Culture, Levels

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• Cities are obvious metaphors for life. We call roads arteries and so forth.

  Geoffrey West

  Cities, Metaphor, Arteries

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• Cities are the crucible of civilization.

  Geoffrey West

  Civilization, Cities, Crucible

  Geoffrey West (2017). “Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies”, p.8, Penguin

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• The paradigm of physics - with its interplay of data, theory and prediction - is the most powerful in science.

  Geoffrey West

  Powerful, Data, Physics

  "The City in Numbers: an Equation That Explains Urban Life". wired.co.uk, March 29, 2011.

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