Geoffrey West

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.

— Geoffrey West

Everything around us is scale dependent. It's woven into the fabric of the universe.

— Geoffrey West

Humanity has just crossed a major landmark in its history with the majority of people now living in cities. Cities have long been known to be society's predominant engine of innovation and wealth creation, yet they are also its main source of crime, pollution, and disease. The inexorable trend toward urbanization worldwide presents an urgent challenge for developing a predictive, quantitative theory of urban organization and sustainable development

— Geoffrey West

I’ve always wanted to find the rules that govern everything. It’s amazing that such rules exist. It’s even more amazing that we can find them.

— Geoffrey West

Once we started to urbanize, we put ourselves on this treadmill. We traded away stability for growth. And growth requires change.

— Geoffrey West

The paradigm of physics - with its interplay of data, theory and prediction - is the most powerful in science.

— Geoffrey West

The good news is cities are extraordinarily resilient. The bad news is that they are also very hard to change.

— Geoffrey West

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.

— Geoffrey West

Cities are the crucible of civilization.

— Geoffrey West

It’s hard to kill a city, but easy to kill a company.

— Geoffrey West

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.

— Geoffrey West