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.)

Egypt's Urban Challenge

More evidence of the groundswell rising around cities in this NYTimes article about Egypt's urbanization. The only major country in the world to see it's urbanization level decline over the last 30 years (from 44% to 43%, compared to East Asia which increased from 26% to 50% over the same time), Egypt faces the challenge of revitalizing its urban centres. The article argues that this will be a key to getting the Egyptian economy back on track.

Living PlanIT

Interesting article in Fast Company about Living PlanIT, the technology company trying to create an "urban operating system" and building a city in Portugal to try it out.

They're doing some very interesting stuff - and a lot of the same things we're looking at in India. Their approach to the construction industry is particularly interesting, and potentially transformative. I also agree with Eccles' analysis towards the end that architects and urban planners are missing the boat by not engaging with the business and technology community.

However, as interesting as their ideas are, I think the city as operating system idea goes too far when you start thinking that the technology platform is the raison d'être of the city. People come together in urban agglomerations as a part of much larger and much more fundamental social and economic transformations. There are only a few places in the world today with the sort of growth and change going on to feasibly talk about building new cities -- China, India, a few places in Africa... the list is pretty short and it doesn't include western Europe.

Learning to Live With Climate Change

Very thought-provoking article from Wired a couple of years ago regarding the futility of trying to stop climate change. Basic idea is that we've already gone too far. The amount of emissions in the air is already so high that climate change is inevitable. Throw in the political inability to make the sort of massive changes in behavior that would be required just to stabilize, let alone reduce our emissions, and we need to start planning for how to cope with the different climate.

Random Post: Yun Jung-Hee

Loved this article about South Korean actress Yun Jung-Hee in the NYTimes. Gorgeous piece of writing about her newest movie, Poetry, and her career, which spanned 330 films from 1967-1994. This is her first movie since retiring in '94.

She plays a pensioner struggling to learn to write poetry while suffering the onset of dementia.

“To Mi-ja, writing poems is important because she’s discovering the meaning of the world,” Mr. Lee [the director] said. “The paradox of her life is that she’s leaving the world and forgetting the words.”

The Cities Programme at LSE

Starting the Masters program in City Design and Social Science at LSE on the 27th. What exactly is "City Design and Social Science"? Good question. Here's an interview with the director of the Cities Programme (with an extra "-me" because it's in London), Dr. Fran Tonkiss.

The key takeway:

"There are two ways of understanding our commitment to the concept of city design. Firstly and most simply, our approach differs from an idea of urban design as primarily concerned with the public realm, or with ‘the space between buildings’. While such spaces form part of our focus, our interest is less with specific design interventions than with larger processes of city-making, not only through the practice of design but through policy and planning, the economics of development, and environmental and infrastructure strategies. This links to the second point, which is the defining character of the Cities Programme approach: our central concern with the relationship between the social and the physical production of urban space. For us, cities are always understood as social as well as physical forms. The two parts of the equation are equally important: the focus on city design as an integrated process, and the value of social science – sociology, economics, geography, planning and public policy – in the analysis of how cities are made, and how they can be made better."

3rd Ward

Very cool article in the NYTimes about an urban artisans collective in Brooklyn called 3rd Ward. Communal design and fabrication facilities, classes, studio space. Amazing for both the creative community it's brought together and also that it's become a successful business model. Would this work in Mumbai??

Paul Romer: Charter Cities

About Paul Romer's concept of Charter Cities - autonomous regions in developing countries administered by a foreign nation. Roughly analogous to Hong Kong under British rule.

Why We Hate HR

A sentiment I can generally agree with.

Apple's Secret Sauce

The ingredients that make Apple the best company in the world (and have everyone trying to imitate them). From Fast Company.

Innovation in emerging economies is the next big business revolution, from The Economist. Also see their special report on the topic.

Long Cycles and the Start of a New Golden Age

Thought this article by Mark Stahlman in Strategy + Business was fascinating. It says that:

- We're in the middle of a 60-year technology cycle.
- The last 30 years have been all about investment and deployment of technology.
- The current crash is a typical phenomenon that happens mid-cycle when financial speculation runs too hot
- The next phase of the cycle is a "golden age" of technological adoption and maturity

Please read it and let me know what you think.

Cool article in Newsweek about the emerging field of cultural neuroscience. Researchers are using brainscans to identify the ways people from different cultures process information. Some commonly recognized cultural values are directly reflected in the brain areas people from those cultures use to process different types of information -- recognizing people, concepts of self and group, even doing math.

Hyperlocal Urban Development

Very cool blog post from Allison Arieff in the NYTimes.com site. Describes urban planners using GIS to identify abandoned, publicly-owned spaces in San Francisco and plan for their re-development.

"Looking through this lens also enables us to think about infrastructure in a new way. The era of massive, expensive, centralized projects like the Big Dig in Boston has passed. “Now, with the ability to model dynamic systems, we can show a much more decentralized collection of resources could provide greater benefit,” de Monchaux says. “If, in the 19th century, it was a biological metaphor that fueled the creation of Central and Golden Gate parks, the idea that a city needs hearts and lungs to grow, there’s now a networked metaphor. The city is a dense network of relationships. The best way to provide infrastructure is to not go in with a meat ax but to practice urban acupuncture, finding thousands of different spots to go into.”"

High End R&D Increasingly Coming to India

Major multinationals (MNCs) have rapidly increased the scale of their R&D operations in India. See this brief description from Rediff.com Business.

India vs. China - Which is stronger after the recession?

Yup. I agree with this article in Time Magazine's online edition. Although India's recovery in the last year has been slightly less spectacular then China's, I think the underlying growth here is much more sustainable.

Darwinian Economics

Cornell Prof. Robert Frank blogs in the NYTimes about the economic lessons in Darwin's theories of evolution. Frank contends that Darwin provides a better framework for understanding competition than Adam Smith's Invisible Hand concept:

Smith’s basic idea was that business owners seeking to lure customers away from rivals have powerful incentives to introduce improved product designs and cost-saving innovations. These moves bolster innovators’ profits in the short term. But rivals respond by adopting the same innovations, and the resulting competition gradually drives down prices and profits. In the end, Smith argued, consumers reap all the gains.

The central theme of Darwin’s narrative was that competition favors traits and behavior according to how they affect the success of individuals, not species or other groups. As in Smith’s account, traits that enhance individual fitness sometimes promote group interests. For example, a mutation for keener eyesight in hawks benefits not only any individual hawk that bears it, but also makes hawks more likely to prosper as a species.

In other cases, however, traits that help individuals are harmful to larger groups. For instance, a mutation for larger antlers served the reproductive interests of an individual male elk, because it helped him prevail in battles with other males for access to mates. But as this mutation spread, it started an arms race that made life more hazardous for male elk over all. The antlers of male elk can now span five feet or more. And despite their utility in battle, they often become a fatal handicap when predators pursue males into dense woods.

(Image from NYTimes.com)

Chimerican Relations

David Brooks reports on a debate over the relationship between China and America. Niall Ferguson takes a hawkish view about the ambitions of a power-hungry China. James Fallows argues that China's interests are oriented towards internal stability and integration with the global economy -- not world domination.

I agree strongly with Fallows, and the psychology argument that Brooks highlights is the key. China doesn't want to rule the world. It does want respect and security... and it wants to be very, very successful. But given those things, Chinese psychology doesn't call for it to dominate other nations the way German or Japanese psychology did in the 20th century.

Afraid of the Dark

Cool article in another NYTimes.com blog -- this time by Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert -- discussing the psychological connection between uncertainty and unhappiness. He says the hardest part of the current economic recession is not knowing what's going to happen. Counterintuitively, knowing things will be bad makes us happier than knowing there is a possibility they will be good. In his words:

Why would we prefer to know the worst than to suspect it? Because when we get bad news we weep for a while, and then get busy making the best of it. We change our behavior, we change our attitudes. We raise our consciousness and lower our standards. We find our bootstraps and tug. But we can’t come to terms with circumstances whose terms we don’t yet know. An uncertain future leaves us stranded in an unhappy present with nothing to do but wait.

This is closely related to something I heard (and believe), about the relationship between psychological stress and control over a situation. Things can be bad, but as long as feel we have control over the situation, we aren't too stressed. Conversely, it's when we feel things are out of our control that we experience stress. A useful application of this principal in my own life is to look at any situation, and try to understand what things you can control and what things you can't... then accept the things you can't control and only worry about the ones you can.

(image by Shoboshobo)

Fascinating: The Underlying Math of Cities

In a post on Olivia Judson's blog for the NYTimes, Leon Kreitzman discusses the hidden patterns mathematics has identified in the efficiency of cities.

He talks about Zipf's Law -- that city size in a nation is inversely proportional to rank (i.e. the biggest city is 2X as large as the 2nd-biggest, and 3X as large as the third biggest) -- and the way cities get more efficient as they get bigger. A topic also covered here, and a trait that is shared not just by cities, but also by mammals.

The similarities between cities and mammals are particularly interesting because they highlight the fact that cities and animals are in some ways both organisms. Mammals are collections of cells and organs organized through evolution to perpetuate life (ignoring for the moment, more lofty potential explanations). Cities are collections of individuals and infrastructure organized through society to enhance productivity and growth. Makes one wonder what the relevant organs correspond to in a city. I've always heard people say City Hall is full of assholes.

(Image above by Lee Jang Sub)