I read this book awhile back, and I wasn’t really impressed. There was a pervasive emphasis on the superiority of cities, but it was a highly superficial analysis of largely cherry-picked statistics; for example, using patents as a proxy for economic productivity. I also read a quote (on HN, in fact) that resonated with my skepticism in the context of Scale, (paraphrasing) “like a vacuum, Nature abhors a bare exponential; it’s usually a sigmoid in disguise.” Maybe there is a universal power law relationship in complex systems, but that seems like only part of the story.
I think the research in the field is fairly limited - which might make the book sound limited, but I didn't really see any picking of cherries, rather than very few cherries to pick from :).
Also West makes it pretty clear what he thinks of a bare exponential & corollary phase transition. The scaling power-law relationship however does not imply any sort of bare exponential growth.
A really good book around the same subject is Human Scale by Kirkpatrick Sale. The book was written 40 years ago and talked about how society was getting too far out of scale for humans to control.
