Ego City: Cities organized like human brains

This is something that I didn’t expect to come across, a scientific paper that compared network complexity between brains and cities.  More interesting is that they found that as both the neocortex and cities grow in surface area, the interconnecting infrastructure scales up at the same rate.

I’m still processing what this may mean. I’m interested in seeing what cities they used as cases, American vs. European, west coast vs. east coast, or maybe some type of composite amalgamation.Another question, which I guess is inherent in the examples above, is whether they used only highways or all types of transportation infrastructure in the study.

One last observation, the researcher, Mark Chaingzi, is quoted as saying “When scaling up in size and function, both cities and brains seem to follow similar empirical laws. They have to efficiently maintain a fixed level of connectedness, independent of the physical size of the brain or city, in order to work properly.” Are the cities actually functioning properly and efficiently? Guess I’ll have to add this to my pile of articles to be read.

Ego City: Cities organized like human brains.