“It’s like being on a treadmill that keeps on getting faster,” West says. “We used to get a big revolution every few thousand years. And then it took us a century to go from the steam engine to the internal-­combustion engine. Now we’re down to about 15 years between big innovations. What this means is that, for the first time ever, people are living through multiple revolutions. And this all comes from cities. Once we started to urbanize, we put ourselves on this treadmill. We traded away stability for growth. And growth requires change.”

Good news everyone! The more problems we create, the more problems we fix, more quickly. And I like that the URL has “Urban West” in it because one of those words is misleading when paired with the other in the context of this article. Which, I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.

Tags: Geoffrey West, nytimes, physics, urbanization

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 20th, 2011 at 01:04.