circa 2009, and relevant today
Historically a place where people live, has been called a city... but now what?
These thoughts were prompted by a week at the Santa Fe Institute in 2009, technical analysis, social evaluations, political observations and philosophical insights of others:
Growth, Innovation, Scaling, and the Pace of Life in Cities, by Luis Bettencourt, José Lobo, Dirk Helbing, Christian Kühnert, and Geoffrey West;
The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett;
Some African Countries are Just Not Viable, by Daniel Howden;
Post-Wall: Neo Anti-Communism, by Slavoj Žižek
In the shifting context from a 20 year reign of Western, US engineered socio-economic order, to something else in the upcoming 90 years, following are some thoughts about the places where human beings live. Historically a place where people live, has been called a city... but now what?
city?
From 3100 BC to 200 BC, “cities” generally reached 50,000 people with the largest places achieving 100,000. In 1500, the beginning of the modern era, the largest city in the world was Beijing with a population of 672,000, and the 9th largest city Guangzhou had 150,000 people. Populations in these ranges had been relatively unchanged for cities since 200BC. In a mere 500 years, populations of metropolises have increased by a factor of 50 with Tokyo having almost 35,000,000 people today.
On average, when the population of a place doubles, economic activity increases by 15%: growth equates to increasing economic potentials. Such growth occurs with increasing specialization of the citizen’s skills, yielding increasing knowledge potentials. A corollary is that governing methods also adapt in the effort to manage more groups of specialists, who have different skill sets and thus different viewpoints. Civility matters: the evolution of places has demonstrated that cooperation is a more successful evolutionary strategy. Governance of larger places, with more specialists, requires increasing civility. Indeed, despite claims regarding the inhumanity of industrialized warfare in the 20th century, the data unequivocally shows that there has been a decrease in the percentage of human deaths due to warfare with the evolution of civilization.
Larger places enable more specializations, which depend on governance of more diverse specialists, resulting in higher levels of civility.
If larger places do not learn how to “get along” with more and more differences, revolutions occur which reduce the populations. Events like these reduce the differences between specialists and return lifestyles to older, simpler, or more accurately self-similar lifestyles.
The challenge of long-term governance (managing a place) whether it was 3100BC and 30,000 people, or today and 35,000,000 people, is to make places more populous, thus providing the conditions for increased economic and knowledge potentials. The methods for increasing populations are many:
places which support larger family lifestyles,
more efficient operation of infrastructure,
longer lifespans,
better healthcare
valuing other people’s idiosyncrasies.
Governments no longer have a monopoly on places to live: migrations of people will happen more frequently and faster than in the past. Along with people choosing a place to live suited to their particular skill set, comes the competition between governments to build the most desirable places to live.
against the grain: a non-US model
Ninety percent of homes in Helsinki Finland are owned by the government. Additionally within multi-family buildings (vast majority of homes), the government leases homes to a mix of generational groups: elderly, singles, young families, etc. These features increase the chances that:
increasing civility will emerge from frequent interactions with people of different generations and different specializations
economically efficient infrastructure will emerge through better quality housing stock (urban infrastructure) since an entity is responsible for many generations
Combined into a globalized complex adaptive system, Helsinki is providing the conditions for increased economic and knowledge potentials.
human learning: skills, adaptability & civility
Living in a society, operating within or participating with a society, human beings negotiate situations. A situation may involve a task requiring skills, it may require utilizing a novel approach to a dilemma, and it often requires interacting with others having different viewpoints. Preparing people to perform well in unexpected situations is the challenge of education.
Education facilitates the phenomenon of economic and knowledge potentials tending to increase with growing population. At the level of a single human being “Education is about providing a motivational frame for the student to learn.” according to the physicist Alfred Hubler. The process of education is visible in three domains:
repetitive interactions enable feedback and skill development
travel expands one's experiences, allowing for increased civility
awareness of the environment is the basis for knowledge acquisition
Matching expansive educational strategies to the scale of the situation, is related to the age of the individual or group, as well as the situations within which people operate.
Creativity is not a central focus, but emerges naturally, in skill development, knowledge acquisition and civil behaviors. It does not need to be built, or approached directly, creativity is an outcome of well performed interactions in situations between human beings, the physical world and the society they live within.
trading places
Trading goods is a form of communication and a form of travel. From hunter gather societies through todays digital trading algorithms, trade has expanded the environment that existed at any one singular place. The physical place where trade occurred, cities and markets, was always an expansive environment: strange new people, events and things overlapped in a bazaar of suggestive provocation.
These interactions, these communications are the basis for enabling a society to expand beyond the confines of an existing size and tradition. Access to these “places,” physical places or virtual places in the case of communication tools such as trading desks, algorithms and high speed data networks, facilitates the exchange of suggestive provocation.
Similar to the rest of nature, different scales of access to these networks has emerged: power law relationships of places from neighborhoods, towns, cities and metropolises, mirror the scalar infrastructure of information and knowledge networks.
It is the access to any network that distinguishes one “place” from another. So while it may appear that the East Coast of the United States is one city from Boston all the way down to Washington DC, operationally, there are access points to communication and places that remain well defined.
vibrancy
Detroit and New Orleans are becoming less populated for different reasons. Both places are losing economic and knowledge potentials in the process. Luckily lost potentials are not the result of people in those places losing their smarts. Vibrancy is the rate that ideas, goods and services are traded. Vibrancy is independent of the scale of a physical place, and the scale of access to a virtual network. Decline is a sign of the overcapacity of a physical place relative to the transactions occurring, and the overcapacity of a network access point relative to the transactions occurring.
Radically reducing the scale of a place and consolidating access to networks increases the vibrancy of a place because transactions occur more frequently. Restoring the vibrancy is more important than restoring the buildings.
bazarr of suggestive provocation
Humans endeavour to track vibrant experiences, searching for patterns, to become better prepared when confronted with unexpected events in the future. The injection of unexpected phenomenon (vibrancy) challenges established situational models.
At small scales within a specialization, vibrancy enables people to reinvent details of whatever sub-discipline they are focused on. So regardless of the population of a place trading ideas, goods and services, a faster rate of trade supports a more vibrant dynamic and increases economic and knowledge potentials. The paradox of Detroit and New Orleans is that by consolidating infrastructure, they have the potential to re-emerge as inventors of specialized micro-technologies. Continuing to chase after global scale automobile manufacturing and water-based shipping industries are no longer possible relative to: their respective populations, rates of interactions and their situation within a larger global operating environment.
Emerging insights and innovations are necessary to harvest economic and knowledge potentials. Civility, in part, is about being in tune with one’s environment to catch the insight as it wisps past in a vibrant event space. Whether it is catching a naturally occurring phenomenon or recognizing a new solution to a human predicament, civility is participative.
organization of places for living
True enough our world is a rapidly changing global network, but people occupy physical space and require physical accoutrements to survive. Which things go where? Much like biology it is the frequency of occurrence that impacts the operation of society.
Currently the transportation of physical goods has highly stable characteristics: waterways, railroads and airports are very difficult to relocate, and have a huge impact on the possible configurations. These are followed by power stations and other larger scale geographic resources, etc. Even with wireless communication the physical world is still where we live.
Organization of places integrates physical networks with ethereal communication networks according to principles of scale. Increasing the efficiency so that human beings, or a group of human beings are positioned to harvest economic and knowledge potentials is the challenge.
comparativism
Knowledge acquisition by human beings is done through comparison: “keeping up with the Jones’.” In cell formation, comparison is done relative to one’s nearest neighbors. In the human nervous system, comparisons are done from a distance, at the speed of sound. How do we avoid comparing “apples and oranges”? In complex adaptive systems it is critical to identify the scale that one is interested in studying.
Comparisons are helpful to find patterns within the scale of an entity studied. Comparisons are also helpful to find patterns in the processes of phase change, or understanding the conditions between scales. However comparisons across scales tend to be less helpful, leading to gross errors of extrapolation, or projections of false patterns.
Behaviorally, humans compare what they see of people near them, and also between themselves and hypothetical people faraway: movie stars and foreigners. Accepting that there is a contribution of different practices, specialties and viewpoints is difficult: the scale of the patterns may be too large to identify, it may not be necessary to understand the contribution, and the context of a situation is complex. It was much easier to “recognize the value of a contribution” of others, when that value was determined, and or pre-determined, within a moral model of the universe.
What does “increasing civility” mean? Identifying a 10,000 year trend demonstrating that economic power is superseding military power will require more analysis. Yet it is possible that future revolutions are economically driven, with military force utilized less frequently as an archaic remnant. Two interesting paths the world may evolve towards:
moral obligations are put out of business by sciences of complex phenomena
economic power supersedes war powers
asia
Of the 34 largest cities in the world today, 19 are on, or near, Asia. This is why economic power is shifting from West (Europe and North America) to East: they have larger cities. Such a data based viewpoint would yield the following conclusion: the West is losing economic power because cities have stopped growing. This has occurred due to lower birth rates, less economic opportunity, and a cultural reluctance to live in megacities (over 20 million population). Some examples of reluctance is the cultural bias to preserve old means and methods of living, the “slow cities” movement, huge expenditures on preserving old infrastructure, limited spending on new massive infrastructure which would enable growth, the lack of cultural support for large families.
A corollary is that if we can’t solve the problems of living together in mega cities, we won’t grow. These are not architectural issues, but organizational issues. Today’s mega cities are on the leading edge of solving problems of living together without allowing crime to run rampant. Is there a limit to size growth, ie. if bigger cities always have more wealth, then we need bigger cities? It may turn out to be similar to heart rate vs. body size; at a certain point there are structural problems that can’t be overcome. The question is what might those structural limitations to growth be for cities?
In another 5000 years, these factors will continue to reduce the percentage of human beings killed in human against human warfare. Knowledge is acquired while one is aware of the expansiveness of a situation. Take Alfred Hubler’s idea and translate it to the level of society:
Organization of place is providing a situational frame for a group to advance their economic and knowledge potentials.