The urban organism

Abstract

Visitors to the area around Nature’s London offices will be familiar with the scene: unending traffic and noise; the hurly-burly of the Underground; streets, concourses and platforms filled with people intent only on reaching their destination quickly. It’s received wisdom that the bigger a city is, the faster life moves; Luis Bettencourt and colleagues supply some empirical evidence to back up that perception (Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 104, 7301–7306; 2007).