CONCEPT
Why Cities Don't Die
West's striking empirical finding that cities, alone among complex adaptive systems, show no intrinsic mortality — a consequence of
superlinear scaling and the open network topology that produces it.
Organisms grow to a characteristic size, maintain
homeostasis, and die. Companies grow, plateau, and die on mathematically predictable schedules. Cities do neither. They grow. They sometimes shrink. They transform. But they do not die of
natural causes. In West and Bettencourt's data, the death rate of cities from internal causes is effectively zero. Rome has been sacked, burned, occupied, and depopulated by
plague — yet it persists, with a population today exceeding that of the Roman Empire's capital at its height. Detroit lost sixty percent of its population
between 1950 and 2010, but it did not die; it shrank, painfully, then began to grow again differently. Cities are destroyed only by external catastrophes — Pompeii by Vesuvius, Hiroshima by nuclear weapons. Absent such interventions, cities persist indefinitely. There is no mathematical equivalent of the biological sigmoid curve for cities, no built-in deceleration leading to stagnation and death. The growth dynamics of cities are, in principle, open-ended — a property produced by their superlinear exponent