A macroevolutionary theory of urbanization

Urbanization is perhaps the most consequential and best documented process in the archaeological and historical record, yet we lack a formal evolutionary theory to explain it. It is hypothesized that increases in the productivity, density, and scale of urban social organization confer competitive advantages on polities and that the cultural evolutionary process selects for polities that maximize these urban properties subject to institutional and energetic constraints. This hypothesis is formalized as a set of quantitative predictions describing cross-cultural urban scaling and tested with archaeological and historical data describing hundreds of cities and polities from across the globe spanning the last 7,000 years. The results support the claim that cities have evolved toward maximal productivity, density, and scale.