1. The Big Picture 1
Introduction, Overview, and Summary
We Live in an Exponentially Expanding Socioeconomic Urbanized World
A Matter of Life and Death
Energy, Metabolism, and Entropy
Size Really Matters: Scaling and Nonlinear Behavior
Scaling and Complexity: Emergence, Self-Organization, and Resilience
You Are Your Networks: Growth from Cells to Whales
Cities and Global Sustainability: Innovation and Cycles of Singularities
Companies and Businesses
2. The Measure of All Things: An Introduction to Scaling 35
From Godzilla to Galileo
Misleading Conclusions and Misconceptions of Scale: Superman
Orders of Magnitude, Logarithms, Earthquakes, and the Richter Scale
Pumping Iron and Testing Galileo
Individual Performance and Deviations from Scaling: The Strongest Man in the World
More Misleading Conclusions and Misconceptions of Scale: Drug Dosages from LSD and Elephants to Tylenol and Babies
BMI, Quetelet, the Average Man, and Social Physics
Innovation and Limits to Growth
The Great Eastern, Wide-Gauge Railways, and the Remarkable Isambard Kingdom Brunei
William Froude and the Origins of Modeling Theory
Similarity and Similitude: Dimensionless and Scale-Invariant Numbers
3. The Simplicity, Unity, and Complexity of Life 79
From Quarks and Strings to Cells and Whales
Metabolic Rate and Natural Selection
Simplicity Underlying Complexity: Kleiber's Law, Self-Similarity, and Economies of Scale
Universality and the Magic Number Four That Controls Life
Energy, Emergent Laws, and the Hierarchy of Life
Networks and the Origins of Quarter-Power Allometric Scaling
Physics Meets Biology: On the Nature of Theories, Models, and Explanations
Network Principles and the Origins of Allometric Scaling
Metabolic Rate and Circulatory Systems in Mammals, Plants, and Trees
Digression on Nikola Tesla, Impedance Matching, and AC/DC
Back to Metabolic Rate, Beating Hearts, and Circulatory Systems
Self-Similarity and the Origin of the Magic Number Four
Fractals: The Mysterious Case of the Lengthening Borders
4. The Fourth Dimension of Life: Growth, Aging, and Death 147
The Fourth Dimension of Life
Why Aren't There Mammals the Size of Tiny Ants?
And Why Aren't There Enormous Mammals the Size of Godzilla?
Growth
Global Warming, the Exponential Scaling of Temperature, and the Metabolic Theory of Ecology
Aging and Mortality
5. From the Anthropocene to the Urbanocene: A Planet Dominated by Cities 209
Living in Exponentially Expanding Universes
Cities, Urbanization, and Global Sustainability
Digression: What Exactly Is an Exponential Anyway? Some Cautionary Fables
The Rise of the Industrial City and Its Discontents
Malthas, Neo-Malthusians, and the Great Innovation Optimists
It's All Energy, Stupid
6. Prelude to a Science of Cities 247
Arc Cities and Companies Just Very Large Organisms?
St. Jane and the Dragons
An Aside: A Personal Experience of Garden Cities and New Town
Intermediate Summary and Conclusion
7. Toward A Science of Cities 269
The Scaling of Cities
Cities and Social Networks
What Are These Networks?
Cities: Christalls or Fractals?
Cities as the Great Social Incubator
How Many Close Friends Do You Really Have? Dunbar and His Numbers
Words and Cities
The Fractal City: Integrating the Social with the Physical
8. Consequences and Predictions: From Mobility and the Pace of Life to Social Connectivity, Diversity, Metabolism, and Growth 325
The Increasing Pace of Life
Life on an Accelerating Treadmill: The City as the Incredible Shrinking Time Machine
Commuting Time and the Size of Cities
The Increasing Pace of Walking
You Are Not Alone: Mobile Telephones as Detectors of Human Behavior
Testing and Verifying the Theory: Social Connectivity in Cities
The Remarkably Regular Structure of Movement in Cities
Overperformers and Underperformers
The Structure of Wealth, Innovation, Crime, and Resilience: The Individuality and Ranking of Cities
Prelude to Sustainability: A Short Digression on Water
The Socioeconomic Diversity of Business Activity in Cities
Growth and the Metabolism of Cities
9. Toward a Science of Companies 379
Is Walmart a Scaled-Up Big Joe's Lumber and Google a Great Big Bear?
The Myth of Open-Ended Growth
The Surprising Simplicity of Company Mortality
Requiescant in Pace
Why Companies Die, but Cities Don't
10. The Vision of a Grand Unified Theory of Sustainability 411
Accelerating Treadmills, Cycles of Innovation, and Finite Time Singularities
Afterword 427
Science for the Twenty-first Century
Transdisciplinarity, Complex Systems, and the Santa Fe Institute
Big Data: Paradigm 4.0 or Just 3.1?
Postscript and Acknowledgments 449
Notes 457
Index 465
List of Illustrations 481