Urban Analytics and

City Science
Environment and Planning B: Urban
Book Review Analytics and City Science
0(0) 1–2
! The Author(s) 2017
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Geoffrey West, Scale: The universal laws of growth, innovation, sustainability, and the pace of life in
organisms, cities, economies, and companies, Penguin Press: New York, 2016; 496 pp. ISBN: 978-1-
59420-558-3, $30 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Wenfei Xu, CARTO
DOI: 10.1177/2399808317735012
Biological processes have often inspired architecture and urban planning. Perhaps one of the
most influential examples is the birth of Metabolism, a 1960s era architectural movement
that emerged as a response to the rigid and didactic Modernism of the Corbusian cohort.
The movement advocated for an organic development of cities reflective of the organic
structure of social interactions. The term – a direct reference to its biological counterpart
– is the ideological thread connecting the different sections of Geoffrey West’s book ‘‘Scale’’.
That, and the logarithmic scaling principles of fractal-like networks.
‘‘Scale’’ is an approachable tome of West’s work in complexity theory across different fields.
He invites the reader to join him on a leisurely stroll, in many senses (the book is nearly 500
pages), as he chronicles his research on scaling principles. The book is structured in roughly
three sections – biology, cities, and companies. His logarithmic lens first focuses on the field of
biomechanics and reveals some scientifically wondrous discoveries of non-linear similarity.
Urban science and the science of companies are then given a similar, though perhaps more
reductive treatment, revealing that cities and companies also behave in similar ways to
organisms.
West takes his time to supply readers with overviews, lemmas, examples, and detours on
the way to explaining the underlying principles of the theory of scale. The reader is introduced
to a range of ideas from Richardson’s coastline paradox as a precursor to fractal geometry, to
the impossibility of the Godzilla’s existence based scaling laws, to a story about working in an
East End brewery in London during West’s youth, as an indication of the rapid changes in
standards of living in cities. Through these anecdotes, he builds a powerful argument that
feels intuitive, approachable, and almost too easily digested.
In the first section of the book describing allometry, West builds up to different scaling
principles of animal and plant life. We begin with the animal’s circulatory system, which,
being optimized for metabolic efficiency, is a space-filling fractal-like network of blood
vessels that change from an alternating current of blood flow to direct current as our
vessels get smaller and smaller, down to their invariable terminal units – the capillary.
What connects almost all animals are these principles of metabolic maximization, which
results in an animal’s volume being proportional to the volume of its blood (there are
corresponding properties in plants).
‘‘Scale’’ then invites the reader to shift focus from the principles of biology to the
‘metabolism’ of cities, bringing along all the accumulated knowledge of scaling principles
we have just acquired to apply them to cities.
2 Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science 0(0)

It should be no surprise then, to discover that West also advocates for a science of cities in
which urban growth is governed by an optimization of energy in versus energy out. We learn
that urban infrastructural features exhibit economies of scale, to the same inverse degree that
social indicators scale superlinearly with population. In laying out his argument, West makes
several elegant and insightful observations. One such is the connection between the study of
social networks to the study of cities: West proposes that quantitative limitations to our
social interactions, as studied by Robin Dunbar, are the invariable terminal units of the
urban network, putting into perspective the broader importance of research on social
networks. Another is the fallacy of using implicitly additive metrics such as per capita
measures, which suggest that cities are only sum of their citizens.
The book concludes with a cautionary proposition that we must optimize for a system
that enables open-ended growth by creating entirely revolutionary innovations on the
magnitude of the Industrial Revolution, and at an increasingly accelerated pace, in order
to maintain resource availability and survive as a society. It is a somewhat positivist
approach – it remains for us to solve for leaps in innovation that would help overcome
our finite resources.
Ultimately, West’s approach to urban growth means to extract generalizable principles,
which lends itself to metrics and analyses on an aggregated and long-term horizon. However,
this often obscures complex dynamics and problems arising from continued urban growth in
its current fashion. An obvious example is the rising inequality in the United States despite
growth in aggregate statistics such as median income (Piketty et al., 2016; Saez, 2009) and
derivative issues such as falling income mobility (Chetty et al., 2014) and the
commodification of essential components of urban life such as housing (Marcuse and
Madden, 2016) and culture (Currid, 2007; Mommaas, 2004; Ley, 2003). West briefly
acknowledges inherent and growing inequalities that are resultant from the market-driven
systems of growth but only treats this as an unfortunate consequence of the ultimately
beneficial implications on urban growth.
‘‘Scale’’ tells an important story about new revelations discovered when the world is
viewed through a different lens, a concept that West’s own work could perhaps benefit from.

References
Chetty R, Hendren N, Kline P, et al. (2014) Is the United States still a land of opportunity? Recent
trends in intergenerational mobility. The American Economic Review 104(5): 141–147.
Currid E (2007) How art and culture happen in New York. Journal of the American Planning
Association 73(4): 454–467.
Ley D (2003) Artists, Aestheticisation and the Field of Gentrification. Urban Studies 40(12): 2527–
2544. doi:10.1080/0042098032000136192.
Marcuse P and Madden D (2016) In defense of housing by Peter Marcuse, David Madden. Available
at: www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/533260/in-defense-of-housing-by-peter-marcuse-david-
madden/9781784783532 (accessed 2 September 2017).
Mommaas H (2004) Cultural clusters and the post-industrial city: Towards the remapping of urban
cultural policy. Urban Studies 41(3): 507–532.
Piketty T, Saez E and Zucman G (2016) Distributional national accounts: Methods and estimates for
the United States. National Bureau of Economic Research. Available at: www.nber.org/papers/
w22945 (accessed 21 September 2017).
Saez E (2009) Striking it richer: The evolution of top incomes in the United States (Update with 2007
Estimates). Available at: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/8dp1f91x.pdf (accessed 21 September
2017).