Quotes from Geoffrey West

The bigger the city is, the less infrastructure you need per capita.

A city plays the role of a great big magnet that's sucking people up.

Cities are the origins of global warming, impact on the environment, health, pollution, disease, finance, economies, energy are all problems that are confronted by having cities. That's where they - all these problems come from.

Exciting cities stay exciting, and boring cities stay boring.

On average, an individual doesn't have a powerful connection with more than four to six people, and that's just as true here in the U.S. as it is in China.

We form cities in order to enhance interaction, to facilitate growth, wealth creation, ideas, innovation, but in so doing, we create, from a physicist's viewpoint, entropy.

Cities are the crucible of civilization.

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

I spent most of my career doing high-energy physics, quarks, dark matter, string theory and so on.

Sometimes, I look out at nature and I think, 'Everything here is obeying my conjecture.' It's a wonderfully narcissistic feeling.

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

Your cells are not working as hard as your dog's but harder than your horse's. The bigger the animal, the less energy needed to sustain a gram of tissue.

Cities tolerate crazy people. Companies don't.

A human being at rest runs on 90 watts. That's how much power you need just to lie down. And if you're a hunter-gatherer and you live in the Amazon, you'll need about 250 watts. That's how much energy it takes to run about and find food.

When I first saw California, it was extraordinary. Because I came from old, black, dark England, still recovering from World War II. I grew up with bomb sites everywhere.

If you ask people why they move to the city, they always give the same reasons. They've come to get a job or follow their friends or to be at the center of a scene. That's why we pay the high rent. Cities are all about the people, not the infrastructure.

Everything around us is scale dependent. It's woven into the fabric of the universe.

Cities are just a physical manifestation of your interactions, our interactions, and the clustering and grouping of individuals.

Tell me the size of a mammal and I can tell you, to about 85 per cent level, pretty much everything about its physiology and life history, such as how long it is going to live, how many offspring it will have, the length of its aorta, how long it will take to mature, what is the pulse rate in the ninth branch of its circuitry.

Once we started to urbanize, we put ourselves on this treadmill. We traded away stability for growth. And growth requires change.

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.

While exponential growth is a remarkable manifestation of our extraordinary accomplishments as a species, built into it are the potential seeds of our demise and the portent of big troubles just around the next corner.

It is all too often forgotten that the whole point of a city is to bring people together, to facilitate interaction, and thereby to create ideas and wealth, to enhance innovative thinking and encourage entrepreneurship and cultural activity by taking advantage of the extraordinary opportunities that the diversity of a great city offers.

A major intent is to show that underlying the extraordinary complexity, diversity, and apparent messiness of the world we live in lies a surprising unity and simplicity when viewed through the lens of scale.