Geoffrey B. West presents
Why Cities Keep on Growing, Corporations Always Die & Life Gets Faster

As organisms, cities, and companies scale up, they all gain in efficiency, but then they vary. The bigger an organism, the slower. Yet the bigger a city is, the faster it runs. And cities are structurally immortal, while corporations are structurally doomed. Scaling up always creates new problems;... [read more]

Geoffrey B. West presents
Why Cities Keep on Growing, Corporations Always Die & Life Gets Faster

As organisms, cities, and companies scale up, they all gain in efficiency, but then they vary. The bigger an organism, the slower. Yet the bigger a city is, the faster it runs. And cities are structurally immortal, while corporations are structurally doomed. Scaling up always creates new problems; cities can innovate faster than the problems indefinitely, while corporations cannot.

These revolutionary findings come from Geoffrey West's examination of vast quantities of data on the metabolic/economic behavior of organisms and organizations. A theoretical physicist, West was president of Santa Fe Institute from 2005 to 2009 and founded the high energy physics group at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Seminar hosted by Stewart Brand
http://www.longnow.org/people/board/sb1/

Advance Tickets Recommended - Tickets are $10
http://longnow.org/seminars/02011/jul/25/why-cities-keep-growing-corporations-always-die-and-life-gets-faster/

There will be a reception at The Long Now Museum & Store following the Seminar
http://www.longnow.org/contact/

Live Audio Stream of the Seminar for Long Now Members
http://longnow.org/live/