Deborah Byrd

A team of researchers from Arizona, New Mexico and Germany have studied the growth of cities in different parts of the world and have come up with a set of equations related to cities’ consumption of resources and contributions to society.

Their research shows that, as a city grows, its creative output also grows at a faster and faster rate.

The researchers studied data on urban areas in the U.S., Europe and China over the past 150 years. They looked at resources consumed (such as water) and infrastructure required (such as roads and lengths of electrical cable). Then they measured the cities’ creative output: patents issued, “super creative jobs” generated, R&D employment and total wages.

They found that the creative output of cities grows in a way that is superlinear, meaning as the city grew its creative output grew faster and faster.

“It isn’t like if you double the size of a city you double its creative output,” said Jose Lobo, a study author and an economist in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University. “The increase you get in wealth creation is greater than the increase in size of the city.”

He added, “It’s true that large cities have more problems, they are more congested, they create more pollution and they have more crime. But also because of their size, cities are more innovative and create more wealth.

“Large cities are the source of their problems and they are the source of the solutions to their problems,” he said.

This research comes just one year after researchers declared that more than half of the Earth’s population lives in cities, in what some are calling a new urban millennium.

As this new urban millennium begins, more people live in city slums as well. In 2007, the number of city slum dwellers should reach one billion. That’s one of every 6.5 people on Earth. Maybe some of the burgeoning urban creativity can be focused on the plight of slum dwellers.

You can read a longer popular article about creativity increasing as cities get larger in physorg.com: Researchers find ‘large is smart’ when it comes to cities

Or read the original paper: Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities