Accueil. Summify - Cities Are Immortal; Companies Die. All companies die. All cities are nearly immortal. Both are type of networks, with different destinies. There are two basic network forms: organisms or ecosystems. Companies are like organisms, while cities are like ecosystems. All organisms (and companies) have share many universal laws of growth. Creatures age in the same way, whether they are small animals, large mammals, starfish, bacteria, and even cells. They share similar metabolic rates. Geoff West from the Santa Fe Institute has piles of data to prove these universal and predictive laws of life. Ecosystems and cities, on the other hand, scale by greater than one, or 1.15. A less than one rate of exponential growth inevitably leads to an s-curve of stagnation.
The question Geoff West could not answer at tonight’s Long Now talk was: Is the internet more like a company or more like a city? I’d bet it is more like a city. The other question, also unanswerable right now, is: how does one make a company more like a city? Cities Are Immortal; Companies Die. Dancing for survival: Using music to create awareness of climate change. Although climate change poses a global threat that can only be tackled through urgent collective and concerted action, a large section of Kenya’s population are still not aware of its direct impact to their lives and how to respond to the threat. Worse still, the understanding of and action on climate change among the youth in Kenya is still very low, yet they play a significant role in any attempt to bring change either at the community or national levels.
“Big words like global warming and climate change do not make sense to ghetto (slum) people like me,” says 26 year old Nyangolo Abasa, an artist from Dandora, an informal settlement located in the southern side of Nairobi. Kenya continues to experience the impacts of climate change through erratic weather patterns leading to extreme weather conditions like droughts and floods that have had negative effects on the lives of many Kenyans especially those in rural and informal urban settlements commonly referred to as the slums.