[RADIOLAB INTRO]

SXIP SHIREY: Hey, man. How are you?

AARON SCOTT: Doing very well, yourself?

SXIP SHIREY: Good.

JAD ABUMRAD: So Aaron, set this up. Who are we about to meet?

AARON: So this is Sxip Shirey. He lives in Brooklyn.

JAD: And that is, we should say, Aaron Scott. He's a reporter who turned us onto Sxip. And Aaron met up with Sxip because he had this experience.

AARON: That's common to a lot of people who move to New York City.

AARON: Just tell us where you grew up.

SXIP SHIREY: I grew up in the country outside of Athens, Ohio, on 54 acres of wooded land. And I would work all day as a kid in heat.

AARON: Hoeing and picking strawberries.

SXIP SHIREY: Hauling water.

AARON: Planting trees. He'd play in the woods.

SXIP SHIREY: I love the woods.

AARON: But as he got older, he knew he couldn't stay in Athens.

JAD: Why not?

AARON: Well, he's a musician. He wanted to make a living at it, so he bounced around for a bit.

SXIP SHIREY: So I finally ...

AARON: And then finally, at age 30 ...

SXIP SHIREY: There was no place to go except for New York.

AARON: Wait, so it wasn't a matter that you wanted to live in New York

SXIP SHIREY: No, I didn't want to live in New York.

AARON: It was more so New York was your last option?

SXIP SHIREY: It was my last option.

AARON: And he hated it.

SXIP SHIREY: Because it was ugly to me. You know, like too many humans, too many—too much concrete.

AARON: Yeah.

SXIP SHIREY: You know, one theory about autism is that the things that come into an autistic kid's brain all have equal value. They don't know how to sort through it. And when I first came to New York, it was really—it was pretty overwhelming. I had decided to leave, for sure.

AARON: But then ...

AARON: Take us to the roof.

SXIP SHIREY: I was lucky when I first moved here.

AARON: So he's staying with a friend who lives in this big building in Brooklyn Heights.

SXIP SHIREY: Right across from the Twin Towers, and it's 36 stories high.

AARON: And he decides one lonely night to go up onto the roof.

SXIP SHIREY: And there's this intense fog. And the Twin Towers, the bottom of them was covered in the fog, but not the top, so it was like they were floating. And there's a little cuticle, sliver of moon in the sky, and the foghorns are going and the boats are slowly moving. And there's this breeze. And I had this brass penny whistle that my father had given me, and I was standing there and I was playing it and I was really—suddenly something clicked. I was like, "Oh, that must—those are all the bridges. That's the Williamsburg Bridge, that's the Manhattan Bridge, there's the Brooklyn Bridge. That's New York. It's small now."

SXIP SHIREY: And I'm looking at the Statue of Liberty, and my grandmother Anastasia Panny came from Albania and they went to Ellis Island. I could see my history there, too. And it suddenly hit me, like, "Oh my goodness. This is like a coral reef. You can't see the people, but look at this beautiful structure they have created."

SXIP SHIREY: That fog and that air, it was just the whole city was breathing. The whole—nature was breathing. Everything was breathing. And I felt connected on a spiritual level to the city for the first time.

JAD: And so Skip decided to stay.

SXIP SHIREY: For a while.

JAD: For a while.

ROBERT KRULWICH: All over the world people are now moving, of course we know this, from the country to the city. At this point ...

GEOFF WEST: The world, two years ago crossed this extraordinary benchmark ...

JAD: That's physicist Geoff West.

GEOFF WEST: ... where more than half the planet is now urbanized.

ROBERT: 51 percent.

JAD: And that made us wonder, like, how do cities work?

ROBERT: Is there some deep, organic logic that holds all these people together?

JAD: Or as writer Jonah Lehrer puts it ...

JONAH LEHRER: Are cities just these tumors of people on the landscape?

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab, and our topic today ...

ROBERT: Cities.

JAD: Cities.

ROBERT: I love them but I don't know why.

JAD: All right. So in talking about cities, it was kind of hard to know where to start, because every city has its own ...

ROBERT: DNA, kind of.

JAD: Yeah, its own unique feel.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Like, for instance, let me just give you my own stupid example here. So every time I go to St. Louis to visit my mom?

ROBERT: Yeah?

JAD: I'm on the plane, I'm in my own kind of groove. And I step off the plane into the airport and it's just like, with the first step, just hit this wall of—something is different. Like, you feel the difference in your bones.

ROBERT: Because?

JAD: Well, that's the question.

JAD: Is he there?

BOB LEVINE: I'm here.

JAD: What gives a city its feel?

JAD: Oh, is this Mr. Bob Levine?

BOB LEVINE: This is Mr. Bob Levine.

JAD: Mr. Bob Levine is a professor of psychology.

BOB LEVINE: California State University.

JAD: And he thinks the answer to that question is time.

BOB LEVINE: Time.

JAD: That each city warps time in its own unique way.

BOB LEVINE: My cities are my subjects.

JAD: And he's studied this idea for the past 30 years in all kinds of different ways.

BOB LEVINE: We looked at things like percentage of people wearing watches.

JAD: How long does it take bank tellers in each city to change a $20 bill.

ROBERT: Really?

BOB LEVINE: Yeah, and then we looked at talking speed.

JAD: Really?

ROBERT: Talking speed.

BOB LEVINE: Yeah, we'd get on the phone and call post offices, since that seemed like something that would be available every place. And make a standard request.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bob Levine: Would you tell me the difference between regular mail, certified mail, and insured mail?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, postal worker: Okay, certified is when you just need someone to sign for it.]

JAD: Then he says they'd calculate ...

BOB LEVINE: The number of syllables per second.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, postal worker: Regular mail just goes air mail. The office out of Utah.]

JAD: Salt Lake City, Utah.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: 2.73 syllables per second.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, postal worker: Then if you want the return receipt card to come back to your house ...]

JAD: Springfield, Mass.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, postal worker: You pay an extra 70 cents. You understand?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bob Levine: Yes.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: 3.45 syllables per second.]

JAD: And this one?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, postal worker: Certified is when you want ...]

JAD: Not really sure where it's from because the tape lost the ID, but it could be Nashville.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, postal worker: ... proof of mailing, and then you want to know who—you want a return receipt.]

JAD: And if it is Nashville ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: 2.65 syllables per second.]

ROBERT: Slow.

JAD: Well Springfield is like—feoom!

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: But the whole talking thing was just really a prelude for Bob. It got him into what I think he's most known for.

ROBERT: And what we find most fascinating.

BOB LEVINE: We actually looked at walking speed.

JAD: Walking!

ROBERT: Walking. Yeah.

BOB LEVINE: Well, what I would do is I would get into a new city.

[LISTENER: And I'm in Mumbai, India.]

[LISTENER: Jerusalem.]

[LISTENER: Buenos Aires City.]

[LISTENER: Chiang Mai, Thailand.]

JAD: We actually put out a call to Radiolab listeners everywhere ...

[LISTENER: We're in Buchanan in Liberia.]

JAD: ... to help us repeat the study.

[LISTENER: Okay, good morning, Radiolab. I'm recording from Dublin, in Ireland.

[LISTENER: Downtown Oslo.]

[LISTENER: Copenhagen.]

BOB LEVINE: I would get into a new city and ...

JAD: Step one.

BOB LEVINE: ... I would scope out main business and shopping areas.

JAD: Step two, get out some string.

BOB LEVINE: A roll of string.

[LISTENER: My red string.]

BOB LEVINE: 60 feet long.

[LISTENER: 20 meters we use over here, we wouldn't say 'feet,' really.]

JAD: Step three, use that string to measure out the distance.

[LISTENER: Now I just have to roll out the string.

ROBERT: Now do you tape the one end to the sidewalk?

BOB LEVINE: I would just make more.

JAD: Step four, go undercover.

BOB LEVINE: Get in a corridor and, you know ...

JAD: Be cool. Act like you're reading a paper.

BOB LEVINE: Or waiting for somebody.

[LISTENER: All right. Found myself a discrete place.]

[LISTENER: I think I found a pretty nice spot here.]

ROBERT: Do you use a stopwatch?

BOB LEVINE: I would use a stopwatch.

[LISTENER: The stopwatch, with its trusty beep. Watch is working.]

JAD: Ready?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Nancy Sinatra: Are you ready, boots?]

[LISTENER: Okay, I'm ready now.]

[LISTENER: Go!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Nancy Sinatra: Start walking.]

[LISTENER: And it all goes quiet the minute I want to start. Brilliant. Thanks, Dublin.]

JAD: This experiment was actually harder than you would think.

ROBERT: [laughs] Much harder.

[LISTENER: Radiolab people, this is not very easy to do. [laughs]]

JAD: Timing was an issue. People trying to sell you stuff.

[LISTENER: No, no, no. I don't need a shoe shine.]

[SHOE SHINER: Very good shine. Look at my color.]

[LISTENER: No.]

[LISTENER: Pigeons don't count? No, pigeons don't count.]

JAD: Okay.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Nancy Sinatra: Are you ready, boots?]

ROBERT: All together now.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Nancy Sinatra: Start walking.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Step. Step. Step. Step. Step. Step. Step. Step. Step.]

JAD: Actually, it didn't sound like that at all. They weren't in sync, as you can imagine. Every city had its own beat.

[LISTENER: Start. Step, step, step, step, step, step, step.]

JAD: Which on some level we knew, but still the range was pretty amazing.

[LISTENER: Stop. 12.2.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: Oslo.]

[LISTENER: 14.4 seconds.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: Mumbai.]

[LISTENER: 27 seconds.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: Buchanan, Liberia.]

[LISTENER: Wow. [laughs]

[LISTENER: 13.8.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: Buenos Aires.]

[LISTENER: 12.13.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: Mexico City.]

[LISTENER: 10.1 seconds.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: Copenhagen.]

[LISTENER: 21.5 seconds.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: Chiang Mai.]

[LISTENER: 11.57.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: Portland.]

[LISTENER: 15 and a half seconds.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: Jerusalem.]

JAD: Just to break it down. On the high end, you've got ...

[LISTENER: Step. Steps. You're on it. Step. Step. Step. Step. Step. Step.]

JAD: ... the Dubliners.

[LISTENER: Okay, she was 9.5. And that's 10.4.]

JAD: Who take, on average, 10.76 seconds to cover 60 feet.

ROBERT: Compare that to Buchanan, Liberia.

[LISTENER: Step. Step. Step. Step. Step. Step. Step. Looking around, something actually on the head. She got a tiny pink blouse.]

ROBERT: Whose walkers covered the same distance in about ...

[LISTENER: 21 seconds.]

JAD: 21 seconds. So if you want to think about it in football terms, by the time the Dubliner has scored a touchdown ...

ROBERT: The guy from Buchanan, Liberia is somewhere I guess around midfield. Oh my God.

JAD: And the spooky thing, according to Bob Levine, if you do these under the same conditions, same place, you will get the same time. These times don't change. Dublin is always about this.

[LISTENER: Step. Step. You're on it. Step. Step. Step. Step. Step.]

ROBERT: And Buchanan, Liberia is always around this.

[LISTENER: Step. Step. Step. Step.]

JAD: Manhattan, as we found, is right about here, usually.

JAD: Step. Step. Step. With thunder. Step. Step. Step in pink.

JAD: No Dublin, but not bad.

ROBERT: But why the consistency?

BOB LEVINE: What is it that makes that walking speed?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Where does it come from?

BOB LEVINE: You know? I mean, is anybody beating the drum? How well can you change the walking speed? Say a bunch of us got together and decided we were just gonna up it my five percent on a given day. Would we get everybody to do it, and will they even notice the difference?

JAD: Do we make the city? Or does the city make us?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: Thank you to our walkers.]

[LISTENER: Milena in Buenos Aires.]

[LISTENER: Mustafa. Liberia.]

[LISTENER: Yona. Jerusalem.]

[LISTENER: Mira Killam. I'm in Copenhagen.]

[LISTENER: Marta. Oslo.]

[AARON: Portland, Oregon.]

[LISTENER: Kerry Santanatcho, Thailand.]

[LISTENER: Grant Fuller, Mexico City.]

[LISTENER: In Mumbai.]

[LISTENER: Markham Nolan. I'm Dublin, in Ireland.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: Props also to Daniel Estring and Anna Sussman.]

ROBERT: Why?

JAD: I don't know, because they didn't say their name so we put them in there. Okay, so getting back to that question I asked a second ago.

ROBERT: Why is it that cities develop particular beats?

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: I mean, is it because the city does it to the people?

JAD: Or the people do it to the city?

ROBERT: Yeah. And we ran into a couple of guys who may at least have the start of an answer.

GEOFF WEST: Yes.

ROBERT: A couple of physicists, oddly enough, named Geoffrey West and Luis Betencourt.

GEOFF WEST: This is Geoffrey, and there's Luis on the other side of the table.

LUIS BETTENCOURT: I'm here as well. [laughs]

JAD: Cool.

ROBERT: They're at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico.

GEOFF WEST: Lots of mesas and so on.

ROBERT: Nothing like the cities we just visited.

GEOFF WEST: It's almost biblical in its expanse.

LUIS BETTENCOURT: Yeah, the blue skies just kind of make you brave and contemplative and all those good things.

ROBERT: Brave enough, in fact, to claim from their high desert perch that these beats, the meter of every city that we've just been to actually has underneath it a kind of logic.

GEOFF WEST: If you tell me the average speed of walking in some city X.

ROBERT: Take Rochester, New York where people walk at about this beat.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: 60 feet in 12.67 seconds.]

ROBERT: If you don't tell him Rochester, you just tell him the number of beats, he will tell you ...

GEOFF WEST: The population is maybe one and a quarter million people.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: Actual population, 1.03 million people.]

GEOFF WEST: And the average wage, about $16,000 a year.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: Actual average wage, $15,588.

JAD: Wow!

ROBERT: Let me ask you a precise question. Are you 100 percent correct? Are you 80 percent correct?

GEOFF WEST: No, of course some things you will score close to 100 percent, other things 80 percent.

ROBERT: But if you start with just the number of footfalls per unit of time, they can tell you all kinds of other things about the same place.

GEOFF WEST: I can tell you how much crime there is in the city.

LUIS BETTENCOURT: Income, wages, GDP.

GEOFF WEST: Number of colleges.

LUIS BETTENCOURT: Restaurants.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: Fancy restaurants.]

GEOFF WEST: Number of theaters for lease.

LUIS BETTENCOURT: The number of patents being produced there.

GEOFF WEST: Cultural events per capita. Number of theaters, libraries. The number of AIDS cases it's gonna have this year.]

JAD: Really?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, automated voice: Really.]

GEOFF WEST: All of these things are correlated in a quantitative—and I use the word predictive—fashion.

JAD: Wait, are you saying that just from the number of footsteps per given time that you can tell—can you tell me how many libraries there are?

GEOFF WEST: Yeah.

LUIS BETTENCOURT: Yes, we can tell you how many you should expect.

JAD: Wow!

ROBERT: How many things can you count when you're ...

LUIS BETTENCOURT: Oh, presumably an infinite number, but it's limited by the things for which there are data.

JONAH LEHRER: They've got data from the US Census.

ROBERT: That's Jonah Lehrer. He's written about Luis and Geoff, and he's the one who kind of got us thinking about all this.

JONAH LEHRER: Japan.

GEOFF WEST: In China.

JONAH LEHRER: Data from ...

LUIS BETTENCOURT: From sociological surveys. Some data on cell phones.

ROBERT: And when they put all these numbers together, they discovered a deep pattern.

JAD: It all comes from the footsteps.

ROBERT: No, not the footsteps.

JAD: What do you mean?

ROBERT: Even the footsteps are a reflection of this deep and fundamental pattern that governs everything. Just one fact.

JAD: What is it?

ROBERT: You really want to know?

JAD: Yeah, what is it?

ROBERT: Size.

GEOFF WEST: The size.

ROBERT: How many people live there.

GEOFF WEST: Size matters. Size is the largest determinant of all characteristics of the city.

JONAH LEHRER: They would say, "Tell me the size of the city and I can explain the vast majority of all these different variables that we can measure."

GEOFF WEST: Right.

ROBERT: As a city scales up, they say ...

GEOFF WEST: From 100,000 to 200,000, one million to two million, from five million to ten million ...

ROBERT: Everything about it, all those things that they've been measuring, they scale up too but they scale up ...

GEOFF WEST: According to a very simple mathematical formula. It does not matter that New York has big skyscrapers and is on the ocean and that Boise is in the Rocky Mountains, that San Francisco is on San Francisco Bay.

JAD: Wait a second. Wait, wait, wait, wait. That can't be. That can't be. No, I was with you right up to that last point. I mean, you go to the Midwest and it's landlocked, and then you go to a port city and it's on a port. I mean, that's gotta matter.

GEOFF WEST: It matters, but these actually are superficial effects, and account for only 10, 20 percent of their variation.

JONAH LEHRER: What they're saying is that those specificities, the local history is in large part insignificant, and it is completely overwhelmed by these generic laws of urban scaling. That to me is a very interesting and surprising idea, simply because we don't think of cities like that at all.

JAD: No, we certainly do not.

ROBERT: That's because you're not a physicist, so you don't think abstractly in that regard.

JAD: Well, why should I?

ROBERT: Because sometimes it can be very useful. Remember, what these guys have done is they've just created an average profile for every size city. If you're one million or seven million or twelve million, here's how many things you should have.

GEOFF WEST: Now you can ask, "Okay, let's look specifically at that city and ask, is it over-performing or under-performing?"

LUIS BETTENCOURT: Right.

JAD: So what are some cities that are over-performing for their size?

LUIS BETTENCOURT: Of the large cities, San Francisco is quite an innovative city. New York's about average.

JAD: About average?

LUIS BETTENCOURT: In terms of patents.

ROBERT: New York's below average? Did you just say that?

GEOFF WEST: New York produces, roughly speaking, the number of patents it should for a size ...

LUIS BETTENCOURT: You produce, for example, twice as many patents as Boston.

ROBERT: We do?

JAD: Hey, that's something! That's something.

LUIS BETTENCOURT: You should've produced many more given the size difference between about ...

ROBERT: We're just average because they're counting patents. We don't have ...

JONAH LEHRER: This is one of the problems with their larger theory, which is that ...

ROBERT: Pay no attention to that.

JONAH LEHRER: ... they're relying on data that the US Census collected, so that's a real blind spot.

ROBERT: If you're counting fabulous, if we ever can figure out a way to count fabulous.

JAD: Yeah, because he has a point. You're not taking into account the experience of living in a place.

GEOFF WEST: Well, what a theory cannot do is tell you about the essence of New York, the New Yorkness of New York. So to speak, the soul of the city.

JAD: And where does that come from?

JONAH LEHRER: Who knows? I mean, I think that's such a broad question.

JAD: Obviously it has something to do with lots of people being jammed into a tight space, bumping into each other.

JONAH LEHRER: The kind of people who move there.

JAD: What the physicists would call human friction. And that's a story you can't really tell in math, but you can hear it. Take Sxip. He gave producer Aaron Scott a tour of his block in Brooklyn. Listen to who he bumps into everyday.

AARON: He took us on this tour. First place we went was this Jamaican body shop.

JAD: Body shop, as in cars?

AARON: Yeah.

SXIP SHIREY: Collision specialists.

AARON: I mean, it's basically these, you know, West Indies, Jamaican guys listening to reggaeton and hip hop, reggae.

WORKER: No, I like our kind of music. It's like ...

JAD: All right, that's one place.

AARON: And across the street from this is Kinderspiel.

SXIP SHIREY: A hidden Orthodox Jewish cookie bakery. Around the corner from that ...

AARON: It's a butcher that sells live goats and chickens.

SXIP SHIREY: And here are the goats.

AARON: On the corner is the Hispanic Pentecostal Church.

SXIP SHIREY: And every Sunday, they give it up to God with this exceedingly enthusiastic band. I huddle at the window and I think, "This is the best music in the world." I feel that deeply.

AARON: And then across the street from that one is a mosque.

SXIP SHIREY: And it's beautiful on the inside. Across the street ...

AARON: There's this big building.

SXIP SHIREY: And the proprietor of this space is a gay foot fetish film producer. "Show me your feet! Show me your feet!" [laughs]

JAD: So wait a second, you've got Jamaicans, Orthodox Jews with the cookies, Hispanics, Jesus, Allah, goats and gay porn?

SXIP SHIREY: Show me your feet!

JAD: All on the same block?

AARON: Absolutely.

SXIP SHIREY: For me, that's the hammer and the nails. That's the raw ingredients. Now I'm gonna take that home and I'm gonna assemble it into a song.

JAD: And when you heard his music, could you hear all that stuff?

AARON: Some of it is clearer than others. The sounds of the neighborhood, like the reggaeton music of the West Indies auto body shops, he kind of takes them and then filters it through some device that makes it sound like bells.

JAD: Oddly enough, the day that Aaron spoke with Sxip was the day Sxip decided ...

AARON: He's leaving New York City and he put in his notice.

JAD: Which I guess makes his latest album, Sonic New York, kind of a Dear John letter to the city. You can hear it on our website, Radiolab.org.

ROBERT: And Robert Levine's book, the one about walking and time stuff, is called A Geography of Time.

JAD: More information about that too on our website, Radiolab.org. Also, you can subscribe to our podcast there.

[BOB LEVINE: This is Robert Levine. I've been told that ...]

[AARON: Radiolab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

BOB LEVINE: And ...]

[AARON: Produced by WNYC and distributed by NPR.]

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