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.
Every fundamental law has exceptions. But you still need the law or else all you have is observations that don't make sense. And that's not science. That's just taking notes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My provocative statement is that we desperately need a serious, scientific theory of cities and scientific theory means quantifiable, relying on underlying generic principles that can be made in a - put into a predictive framework. That's the quest.
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.
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.
Slums could be thought of as the development of a special organ, or they could be thought of as a tumor that's grown, and in some ways is unhealthy and could ultimately lead to the city's destruction. My own feeling is that slums are probably a bit of both.
