Let a Thousand Skyscrapers Bloom - by J.K. Lund

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Density is destiny. That is the theme of my prior essay on the subject of housing, entitled The Housing “Theory of Everything.” Here at Risk & Progress, I frequently go back to older essays, editing and adding new information when I learn something relevant and important. In this case, I added so much information to the original essay that I decided to split the topic of housing into two parts. The first focuses on the hidden cost of unaffordable housing. Here in the second, I will revisit some pathways to making housing affordable and discuss why this is so important for human progress.

Scale matters, at least according to physicist Geoffrey West. In his book, Scale, he describes scaling laws that underlie everything from individual organisms and corporations to the very cities that we inhabit. I have already discussed one of the more well-known scaling laws; how the square cube law dictates the maximum feasible size of an individual cell and why this forced life to evolve to become multicellular.

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