Geoffrey West Quotes

We form cities in order to enhance interaction, to facilitate growth, wealth creation, ideas, innovation, but in so doing, we create from - from a physicist's viewpoint, entropy, meaning all of those bad things that we feel are engulfing us.

I don't think the Internet has replaced cities in any significant way, nor really could it. Cities are dynamic - and deeply seductive for the people who flock there - because they broker all sorts of fantastic and useful connections, cultural and economic and social.

All through organized history, if you wanted prosperity you had to have cities. Cities are places that attract new people with new ideas.

Annexation is probably the most valuable tool a city has to ensure orderly growth and development.

Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the second law of thermodynamics; i.e. it always increases.

Urbanization is the dominant demographic trend of our time.

Chaos is a good thing.

India's sprawling subcontinent can never become a plus-size Singapore. But perhaps we can weave together an urban web that is the equivalent of a thousand Singapores.

I had always thought that Gurgaon was some village, it was only when I came here that I realized that it is nothing less than a world-class city.

The population of Seoul is decreasing but a large population is not a key element of an advanced city.

Today we live in a chaos of straight lines, in a jungle of straight lines. If you do not believe this, take the trouble to count the straight lines which surround you. Then you will understand, for you will never finish counting.

People make a city, it's not the other way round.

You're an entropic chaos factor

It is a miracle that New York works at all. The whole thing is implausible.

Chaos is hard to create, even on the Internet.

Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized.

Economic progress is the work of the savers, who accumulate capital, and of the entrepreneurs, who turn capital to new uses.

Energy and imagination are the springboards to wealth creation.

Productivity growth is the only possible way to achieve prosperity.

Entropy and optimism: the twin forces that make the world go around.

When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?

We cannot afford merely to sit down and deplore the evils of city life as inevitable, when cities are constantly growing, both absolutely and relatively. We must set ourselves vigorously about the task of improving them; and this task is now well begun.

The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum.

Entropy shakes its angry fist at you for being clever enough to organize the world. (p 2)

The slurbs, urban sprawl, and the infinite number, of housing developments of the postwar boom have contributed to the architecture of entropy.