Is the City Solvable?

Link to a reply I made recently to an article on the Urban Omnibus site regarding the NYTimes article on Geoffrey West, a physicist who has been exploring statistical methods of analyzing cities.

There's plenty of derision in the community of Urbanists regarding West's work. Much of it is well-deserved, in particular his ludicrous claims to have discovered the laws underlying all cities when what he has really uncovered are statistical correlations between size and various indicators of efficiency.

The more important issue relates to how we seek to understand cities. Fifty years ago, Jane Jacobs wrote about cities as problems of organized complexity, analogous to the problems of understanding complex biological organisms facing the Life Sciences. Unfortunately, most city planners and theorists approach cities as either simple problems of cause and effect (like elementary mechanics with simple mathematical solutions) or as problems of disorganized complexity (like thermodynamics, amenable to statistical analysis). Because they misunderstand the nature of the problem, they end up with wrong solutions. What is needed, posited Jacobs, is to approach the study of cities in a manner similar to how the Life Sciences have approached the study of biological organisms.

Unfortunately, hasn't been much progress. Have a century after Jacobs published "The Life and Death of Great American Cities," the study of cities is still largely dominated by architects and social scientists. Much good work has been done, but "we have hardly made the sort of progress that the life sciences have over the last fifty years in developing a practical and useful understanding of the complex systems that make up urban life."

(For an excerpt from Jane Jacob's writing on organized complexity, go here.)