How Cities Grow Like Brains

Posted by: Nate Berg
Thanks to: The Infrastructurist

24 September 2009 - 6:00am

Interconnectedness is just as important to brains as it is to cities, according to researchers who've just released a study about the organizational similarities between cities and brains.

"Just as advanced mammalian brains require a robust neural network to achieve richer and more complex thought, large cities require advanced highways and transportation systems to allow larger and more productive populations. The new study unearthed a striking similarity in how larger brains and cities deal with the difficult problem of maintaining sufficient interconnectedness."

The internal infrastructures of both brains and cities were shown to scale up as they increase in size -- for example, a human brain will have more infrastructure than a dog brain, and Chicago (227.1 sq. miles) has more infrastructure than Seattle (83.9 sq. miles).

Full Story: Ego City: Cities Are Organized Like Human Brains

Source: Science Daily, September 23, 2009

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SCALING LAWS FOR CITIES LIKE BRAINS

Submitted by Myriam Mahiques on Thu, 09/24/2009 - 05:59.

The scaling laws mentioned here are related to fractality. And for mathematical models, it usually applies to extended cities, as the examples show. My question, what happens if the city is extended in, let's say, one point, with a huge tower (for ex. in Shangai) where the tower has all the infrastructure and population of a whole city. At a certain point in the scaling law, the tower fractal dimension, would be a point, equal to D=0, but it still has all the properties of an extended city. I'm wondering how the researchers' formula would apply here, also considering there could be no infrastructure around an isolated tower.
Probably, and depending on the design, the tower itself could not comply with the principles of scaling laws.