I spent most of my career doing high-energy physics, quarks, dark matter, string theory and so on.
Cities are the origins of global warming, impact on the environment, health, pollution, disease, finance, economies, energy are all problems that are confronted by having cities. That's where they - all these problems come from.
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.
Cities are just a physical manifestation of your interactions, our interactions, and the clustering and grouping of individuals.
Once we started to urbanize, we put ourselves on this treadmill. We traded away stability for growth. And growth requires change.
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.
Life is extraordinarily resilient. It's been around for over a billion years.
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.
A city plays the role of a great big magnet that's sucking people up.
