Introduction

Abstract

Our team has convincingly demonstrated that innovation (as represented by the number of people involved in research, the number of research organizations, the number of patents submitted, etc.) scales super-linearly with the size of urban agglomerations, while energy scales sub-linearly and services linearly (cf. Bettencourt, Lobo, & Strumsky, 2007; Strumsky, Lobo, & Fleming, 2005, Bettencourt et al., 2006; Pumain et al., 2006 and Chapters 7 and 8 in this book). This seems to point to the fact that, whereas economies of scale in energy use are an important phenomenon in urbanization, managing information–generating new things and patterns of Organization–is the actual driver behind urbanization. Because people congregate in cities, the latter harness the