The default state of a city is alive.

The default state of a city is alive. The default state of a company is dead. Why?

In Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies, physicist Geoffrey West shows universal scaling laws that seem to show up everywhere.

Companies behave more like living things: they grow to a point and then seemingly inevitably die.

With exceptions, the bristlecone pines of corporations, things like family-owned teahouses in the mountains in Japan that have survived for hundreds of years.

They hit a ceiling of some kind.

Cities, on the other hand, die very rarely.

With exceptions, like ghost towns

They keep growing at a somewhat compounding rate.

Why do cities and companies behave so differently?

Perhaps the difference comes from the difference between swarms and individuals.

A city is a swarm. A company is an individual.

For an individual to survive, that singular, big thing must survive.

For a swarm to survive, at least one small member of the swarm must survive.

An individual is fragile. A swarm is antifragile.

This is a massive difference.

The difference between the two gets stronger and stronger as:

The number of individuals in the swarm grows

The diversity of the swarm grows.

Diversity here would include things like geographical dispersal.

This is because as those grow, the likelihood that at least one member of the swarm survives goes up super-linearly.

For swarms past some threshold of size and diversity, they effectively become immortal.

It's the same observation Stewart Brand made at a talk I recently went to: "Individual civilizations die all the time. Civilization as a whole has never died since it was created."

It's also similar to the difference between a specific living thing vs life as a whole.

This is something that the Netflix series Life on our Planet makes very visceral, as it documents the various mass-extinctions over the eons: the fragility of individual species and the resilience of life as a whole.