Emergence
Page 24
“polycentric, plum-pudding”: Similarly complex pattern formation has been observed in our friends the slime molds, as in the oft-observed concentric ring waves that ripple through the slime mold community at certain points. For years, researchers assumed that the cells at the center of the ring were responsible for the patterns, but new models suggest otherwise. As Garfinkel puts it: “Of course a set of concentric rings has a geometric center. But is the geometric center the cause of the propagation. Not necessarily.” Garfinkel, 198.
Building on the: “A moderate urge to avoid small-minority status may cause a nearly integrated pattern to unravel, and highly segregated neighborhoods to form. Even a deliberately arranged viable pattern, as in Figure 3, when buffeted by a little random motion, proves unstable and gives way to the separate neighborhoods of Figures 5 through 8. These then prove to be fairly immune to continued random turnover. For those who deplore segregation, however, and especially for those who deplore more segregation than people were seeking when they collectively segregated themselves, there may be a note of hope. The underlying motivation can be far less extreme than the observable patterns of separation.” Schelling, 154.
In any model: Krugman, 24–25.
“You’d be surprised”: You know who you are.
And safety is: The emphasis on local knowledge is also key to the way certain “organic” cities develop over time. “Organic planning does not begin with a preconceived goal: it moves from need to need, from opportunity to opportunity, in a series of adaptations that themselves become increasingly coherent and purposeful, so that they generate a complex, final design, hardly less unified than a pre-formed geometric pattern. Towns like Siena illustrate this process to perfection. Though the last stage in such a process is not clearly present at the beginning, as it is in a more rational, non-historic order, this does not mean that rational considerations and deliberate fore-thought have not governed every feature of the plan, or that a deliberately unified and integrated design may not result.” Mumford, 1961, 302.
Marshall Berman wrote: Berman, 347.
City life depends: Computer models of slime mold behavior also showcase the importance of random “swerves”: “The StarLogo slime-mold project provides another example of randomness in the service of exploration. If the program had no randomness, slime-mold cells would rarely leave their clusters. The program would lose its dynamic and organic quality. The screen would become filled with lots of little clusters with little or no interchange of cells between clusters. The randomness in the program makes it more likely for cells to break free of their clusters. As a result, small clusters become less stable: when a small cluster loses one of its cells, the whole cluster is likely to break apart. Small clusters either grow or break apart. The result is fewer, larger clusters, with more cells moving from cluster to cluster. If the goal is for the slime-mold cells to aggregate into large clusters (as is the case with real slime-mold), then randomness plays a very useful role. Resnick, 139.
At sixty-five miles: Jacobs sees the deterioration of car-centric cities as a kind of feedback effect: “Erosion of cities by automobiles is thus an example of what is known as ‘positive feedback.’ In cases of positive feedback an action produces a reaction which in turn intensifies the condition responsible for the first action. This intensifies the need for repeating the first action, which in turn intensifies the reaction, and so on, ad infinitum. It is something like the grip of a habit-forming addiction.” Jacobs, 1961, 350.
world of metaphor: “[Humans] do resemble, in their most compulsively social behavior, ants at a distance. It is, however, quite bad form in biological circles to put it the other way ’round, to imply that the operation of insect societies has any relation at all to human affairs. The writers of books on insect behavior generally take great pains, in their prefaces, to caution that insects are like creatures from another planet… . They are more like crazy little machines, and we violate science when we try to read human meanings in their arrangements. It is hard for a bystander not to do so. Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment.” Thomas, 11.
And that macrodevelopment: The growth of large social structures is sometimes best observed from the long view of outer space, where human development patterns uncannily resemble organic ones: “On larger scales, only occasionally does the work of our energetic species show up: a bridge, a wall, a dam, or a highway. These are typically less than fully three-dimensional. They seem long ribbons when occasionally they are caught in aerial views. Only in their collectivity do we see human artifacts that occupy large surface areas (still not three-dimensional) in the ten-to-hundred-kilometer range, sometimes even beyond. These are the cultivated plains and terraces, the irrigated lands, the clearings of the ancient forest, the great cities and their environs. Theirs is a history of growth more than one of design. For the rest of life, too, we find a similar display. Blades of grass are small, but grasslands and savannahs, like the dark forests north and south, extend over whole regions, easily up to a thousand kilometers across.” Morrison, Eames, 2.
Those of us: “Tens of millions of people making billions of decisions every week about what to buy and what to sell and where to work and how much to save and how much to borrow and what orders to fill and what stocks to accumulate and where to move and what schools to go to and what jobs to take and where to build the supermarkets and movie theaters and electric power stations, when to invest in buildings above ground and mine shafts underground and fleets of trucks and ships and aircraft—if you are in a mood to be amazed, it can amaze you that the system works at all. Amazement needn’t be admiration: once you understand the system you may think there are better ones, or better ways to make this system work. I am only inviting you to reflect that whether this system works well or ill, in most countries and especially the countries with comparatively undirected economic systems, the system works the way ant colonies work.” Schelling, 21.
If the engine: “In the medieval town these powers, the spiritual and the temporal, with their vocational orders, the warrior, the merchant, the priest, the monk, the bard, the scholar, the craftsman and the tradesman, achieved something like an equilibrium. That balance remained delicate and uncertain; but the effort to maintain it was constant and the effect real, because each social component was weighted, each duly represented. Until the close of the Middle Ages—this indeed is one of the signs of the close—no one element was strong enough to establish permanently its own command over all the others. As a result, both physically and politically, the medieval city, though it recapitulated many of the features of the earliest urban order, was in some respects an original creation.” Mumford, 1961, 252.
Merchants who were: Hibbert, 1993, 102.
Those antibodies function: “The immune system is a somatic selective system consisting of molecules, cells, and specialized organs. As a system, it is capable of telling the difference between self and nonself at the molecular level. For example, it is responsible for distinguishing between and responding to the chemical characteristics of viral and bacterial invaders (nonself), invaders that would otherwise overwhelm the collections of cellular systems in an individual organism (self). This response involves molecular recognition with an exquisite degree of specificity. An appropriately stimulated immune system can tell the difference between two large foreign protein molecules composed of thousands of carbon atoms that differ by only a few degrees in the tilt of a single carbon chain. It can tell these molecules apart from all other molecules and retain the ability to do so once it has initially developed that ability. It has a ‘memory.’” Edelman, 1992, 75.
What’s equally amazing: “The immune selective system has some intriguing properties. First, there is more than one way to recognize successfully any particular shape. Second, no two individuals do it exactly the same way; that is, no two individuals have identical antibodies. Third, the system has a kind of cellular memory. After the presentation of an antigen to a set of lymphocytes that b
ind it, some will divide only a few times, while the rest go on irreversibly to produce antibody specific for that antigen and die. Because some of the cells have divided but not all the way to the antibody-making end, they constitute a larger group of cells in the total population of cells than were originally present. This larger group can respond at a later time in an accelerated fashion to the same antigen. As I mentioned before, the system therefore exhibits a form of memory at the cellular level.” Ibid., 78.
The world convulses: “Note one more feature: the neighborhood unit and the functional precinct. In a sense, the medieval city was a congeries of little cities, each with a certain degree of autonomy and self-sufficiency, each formed so naturally out of common needs and purposes that it only enriched and supplemented the whole. The division of the town into quarters, each with its church or churches, often with a local provision market, always with its own local water supply, a well or a fountain, was a characteristic feature; but as the town grew, the quarters became sixths, or even smaller fractions of the whole, without dissolving into the mass… . This integration into primary residential units, composed of families and neighbors, was complemented by another kind of division, into precincts, based on vocation and interest: thus both primary and secondary groups, both Geminschaft and Gesellschaft, took on the same urban pattern. In Regensburg, as early as the eleventh century, the town was divided into a clerical precinct, a royal precinct, and a merchant’s precinct, corresponding to the chief vocations, while craftsmen and peasants must have occupied the rest of the town.” Mumford, 1961, 310.
That pattern in: “It is a form of collective memory—closer in a way to the sense in which the body develops memories than the way in which the conscious mind does. I am using the word memory here in a more inclusive fashion than usual. Memory is a process that emerged only when life and evolution occurred and gave rise to the systems described by the sciences of recognition. As I am using the term memory, it describes aspects of heredity, immune responses, reflex learning, true learning following perceptual categorization, and the various forms of consciousness… . Memory is an essential property of biologically adaptive systems.” Edelman, 1992, 203–4.
“From its origins”: Mumford, 1961, 30.
That clustering becomes: “[These economies] come from the fact that the firm can find in the large city all manner of client, services and suppliers, and employees no matter how specialized its product; this, in turn, promotes increased specialization. Surprisingly, however, economies of agglomeration encourage firms of the same line to locate close to one another, which is why names such as Harley, Fleet, and Lombard Streets and Savile Row—to stick to London—call to mind professions rather than place. Besides the non-negligible profit and pleasure of shop-talk, all can share access to services that none could support alone… . A key point about economies of agglomeration is that small businesses depend on them more than do large ones. The latter can internalize these ‘external economies’ by providing their own services and gain locational freedom as a result… . The relationship between large cities and small businesses is a symbiotic one beneficial to both. The reason is that small firms are the major carriers of innovation, including creative adaptation to change. This was even more true in the days before scientific research contributed much to the new technology.” From Hohenberg and Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, quoted in De Landa, 1997, 85–86.
But cities have: “Though the great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created, it is also—until it becomes too cluttered and disorganized—the best agent for discrimination and comparative evaluation, not merely because it spreads out so many goods for choosing, but because it likewise creates minds of large range, capable of coping with them. Yes: inclusiveness and large numbers are often necessary; but large numbers are not enough. Florence, with some four hundred thousand inhabitants, performs more of the functions of the metropolis than many other cities with ten times that number.” Mumford, 1961, 562.
By some accounts: “The most ancient urban remains now known, except Jericho, date from this period. This constituted a singular technological expansion of human power whose only parallel is the change that has taken place in our own time.” Ibid., 33.
The neighborhood system: Decades before the first graphical interface was designed, Wiener connected the problems of communal information and software interface, gesturing to Vannevar Bush’s visionary essay on the Memex: “On the other hand, the human organism contains vastly more information, in all probability, than does any one of its cells. There is thus no necessary relation in either direction between the amount of racial or tribal or community information and the amount of information available to the individual… . As in the case of the individual, not all the information which is available to the race at one time is accessible without special effort. There is a well-known tendency of libraries to become clogged by their own volume; of the sciences to develop such a degree of specialization that the expert is often illiterate outside his own minute specialty. Dr. Vannevar Bush has suggested the use of mechanical aids for the searching through vast bodies of material.” Wiener, 158.
The specialization of: “Early in the evolution of life-forms, specialized organs developed the ability to maintain internal states and respond differently to external stimuli. The trend ever since has been toward more complex and capable nervous systems with the ability to store extensive memories; recognize patterns in visual, auditory, and tactile stimuli; and engage in increasingly sophisticated levels of reasoning. The ability to remember and to solve problems—computation—has constituted the cutting edge in the evolution of multicellular organisms.” Those different skills—memory, pattern recognition, computation—all have parallels to the development of urban centers: in their clusters of shared information, their capacity to reflect and amplify patterns of human behavior, their mastery of complicated supply-and-demand problems. Kurzweil, 18.
They are the: The potential advantages of high population densities are evident even in primitive societies. “How to keep these costs low if your communications and transportation technologies are primitive? One way is to stay near your customers and suppliers. In other words: live in a society with high population density. This may be the key to the wealth of the American Northwest: not natural abundance per se—an abundance quickly diluted by thick population, anyway—but rather the thick population that does the diluting. Back before communications and transportation were sufficiently high tech to catalyze markets, the stimulus came instead from a habitat that would tolerate large, close populations.” Wright, 47.
As the physicist: “Iberall was perhaps the first to view the major transitions in early human history (the transitions from hunter-gatherer to agriculturalist, and from agriculturalist to city dweller) not as a linear advance up the ladder of progress but as the crossing of nonlinear critical thresholds (bifurcations). More specifically, much as a given chemical compound (water, for example) may exist in several distinct states (solid, liquid, or gas) and may switch from stable state to stable state at critical points in the intensity of temperature (called phase transitions), so a human society may be seen as a ‘material’ capable of undergoing these changes of state as it reaches critical mass in terms of density of settlement, amount of energy consumed, or even intensity of interaction.
“Iberall invites us to view early hunter-gatherer bands as gas particles, in the sense that they lived apart from each other and therefore interacted rarely and unsystematically. (Based on the ethnographic evidence that bands typically lived about seventy miles apart and assuming that humans can walk about twenty-five miles a day, he calculates that any two bands were separated by more than a day’s distance from one another.) When humans first began to cultivate cereals and the interaction between human beings and plants created sedentary communities, humanity liquefied or condensed into groups whose interactions were now more frequent although still loosely regulated. Finally, when a few of these communities intensified agric
ultural production to the point where surpluses could be harvested, stored, and redistributed (for the first time allowing a division of labor between producers and consumers of food), humanity acquired a crystal state, in the sense that central governments now imposed a symmetrical grid of laws and regulations on the urban populations.” De Landa, 1997, 15.
Cities aren’t ideas: “Is the city a natural habitation, like a snail’s shell, or a deliberate human artifact, a specific invention that came into existence at one or more places under the influence of urban ideological convictions and economic pressures? An aboriginal predisposition toward social life, even toward group settlement, may well characterize the human species; but could such a general tendency make man everywhere produce the city as inevitably as a spider produces her web? Could the same dispositions that gave the camp or the hamlet a planetary distribution likewise account for such a many-faceted cultural complex as the city?” Mumford, 1961, 185.
A linear increase: “One of the first cultural evolutionists to emphasize energy technologies was Leslie White. Indeed, some mark the mid-twentieth-century renaissance of interest in cultural evolutionism to the publication in 1943 of his paper ‘Energy and the Evolution of Culture.’ White was also among the cultural evolutionists who more or less ignored information technologies. In a way, this is not surprising. His landmark paper came out a year before Schrödinger’s book appeared, a decade before DNA was discerned, and decades before science had truly grasped the pervasive role of biological information in upholding the integrity of organisms. Thus his attempts to import insights from biology into the social sciences met with limited success. He observed that the question ‘What holds systems together?’ is ‘as fundamental to sociology as it is to biology,’ but he couldn’t carry the analysis further.” Wright, 249.
As the historian: Quoted in De Landa, 1997, 29.