Of Urbanism & Organism - Looking Deeply at What Drives Us
Scaling phenomenon in urban growth links bigness with quickness, in direct opposition to biological principle; Economies of Scale verses Social Webs – two paths for Growth – but with caveats.
Note to Reader: the original version of this essay was written in 2008, based on the paper by Bettencourt et al (2007), updated in 2015, and now (December, 2019) updated/edited once more.
Over sixty percent of the world’s population resides in cities. It is the urban environment — what envelopes most of us from cradle to grave -- that has made, and is making still, the biggest impact on modern thinking, learning, and living.
It is tempting to project onto this complex environment the stature of a living thing; to describe the complexity of a city using the most complex analogy we have: a living being.
You may have heard the metaphor used in intellectual conversation, perhaps even used it yourself -- the city as a growing thing, an organism even. And maybe also you recall reading one of those global survey results of human walking speeds in different sized metropolises throughout the world. And perhaps, unconsciously or from your own experience, you discerned some relationship between city size and citizen speed. And maybe also you wondered if the urban entity (itself) was the thing that was ‘chasing’ us, trying to run us down, forcing us to move faster, lest we be trampled.
Fairly recent research has merged observations and analyses of urban growth and the ‘pace of life’ quite profoundly.
In a 2007 published paper of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of social scientists and philosophers from the Santa Fe Institute announced that these two observed features of cities -- their growth and pace of life -- have been integrated with new knowledge of the nature of mass human habitations. This new knowledge stems from the application of three fundamental growth equations. One of the more surprising discoveries made (but corroborating with observation) was a fundamental reversal of natural law, that is, as a life form increases in size, its pace and heart rate decrease, but -- taking the city as a ‘living thing’ -- its pace-of-life (inclusive of the heart rates of its citizens) increases as the size of the city increases.
The Santa Fe Institute, which resides on the outskirts of Santa Fe, New Mexico, periodically tackles some of the more vexing problems emergent from the phenomenon of complexity, as well as those arising from living in our complex, modern world. In of their most recent investigations of complexity, researchers began taking a deeper look into the phenomenon of urban rapidity and the idea of city-as-organism. The team of thinkers, led by Dr. Geoffrey West (President and Distinguished Professor of the Santa Fe Institute), tasked themselves with understanding the relationships between diverse features of urbanism, such as: pace of life, rate of innovation and change, disease contagion, individual productivity, crime rates, over-all economic growth, and the actually physical growth of a city.
The differential equations that underlie their descriptions of these relationships revealed a particularly striking similarity: all cities that were studied—small to large, familiar to foreign -- exhibited the same patterns and rates of growth. They were all, according to the numbers, scaled versions of each other (e.g., Austin is just a scaled down version of Boston which is a scaled down version of Chicago). In their mathematical analysis of these features (and several others), the researchers found “a universal social dynamic at play that underlies all these phenomena, inextricably linking them in an integrated dynamical network.” That is a profound declaration.
Now, this ‘dynamical networking’ comes in two, competing flavors; the team’s research revealed a basic tension between two of the main dynamic features of cities: there are ‘material economies of scale’ (characterized by infrastructure networks, e.g., total cable length), and social interactions/webs (which foster innovation). The former is equated with efficiency, and the latter with wealth generation. Each feature corresponds to a unique scaling pattern, as expressed by its corresponding equation.
Though it seems clear that these two dynamic features of cities must ultimately be related or interconnected somehow, the researchers sought to learn which of the two -- efficiency or wealth creation -- is “the primary determinant of urbanization, and how each impacts urban growth?”
How the City Is and Is Not Like an Organism
Economies of scale seem to be more in tune with biological organisms, that is, cities and social organizations following this mode of scaling growth will eventually stop growing, as the population reaches a ‘finite carrying capacity’ This is not so with growth driven by innovation and wealth creation (and who doesn’t want to be wealthy?). This growth, according to the equations, becomes ‘faster than exponential’, leading to an ‘infinite population’ in a finite period of time.
Cities generate more wealth as they grow, and the individuals living in them become more productive, which generates still more growth and wealth -- but not equally for all citizens. What emerges from this wealth-productivity-wealth dynamic is an eventual ‘diminishing return’ type effect, wherein the new wealth is spread out over more and more people. Thus, persons wishing to partake of this increasing wealth must work harder (work longer hours, expend more time ‘networking’, invest in new technology, etc.) in order to make up for this. The city itself requires ever more resources and energy to sustain its growth -- the per capita benefits of which diminish as it does so.
Clearly, given resource and carrying capacity limitations (including infrastructural factors), as well an increasing rates of resource consumption, this type of growth is unsustainable. Left to its own ‘natural’ growth behavior and consumption needs, such a city would eventually reach a phase of ‘stagnation’ and, possibly, collapse.
Again: the city driven by an ‘economy of scale’, once it achieves a finite carrying capacity, will (according to the equation) stop growing. The researchers found that the numbers generated by the ‘material economy of scale’ equation were in good agreement with data from biological systems. Ant and termite colony sizes, for example, are all constrained by the ability of the environment (its resources and physical features) to sustain that size colony.
This is not so with social network-driven economies, which are characterized by cycles of innovation. To avoid resource depletion and consequent collapse, these cities must strive to preserve their "wealth and knowledge creation" phase for as long as possible. This means that their response to growth must always be innovation -- defined as the generation of new economic vectors and/or technologies, new methods of resource management and use, as well as new arrangements of ecological relationships.
The Santa Fe researchers are using numerical variables to represent “innovation” here, and so, when/where/how a new innovation cycle actually occurs is somewhat obscure. Also, their research did not address whether location (proximity to plentiful resources, e.g.) is a mitigating factor in exponential growth, carrying capacity, and innovation cycling. Still, in the mathematical models of innovation-driven cities, once a new cycle is achieved, the city resumes/continues its growth following the same scaling pattern as the economy of scale city -- but now with new constraints and starting conditions. This is because the population has grown while transitioning between old and new cycles. According to the authors “this process can be continually repeated, leading to multiple cycles, thereby pushing potential collapse into the future”. Obviously troubling, this statement reminded me of the “solution” city planners had for cleaning up Boston harbor years ago: extend the effluent pipeline six miles further out into the ocean!
Thus, in order to sustain wealth creation--which requires increased productivity (and which requires increased innovation, etc.)--cities must “continuously reinvent the conditions that define and sustain their growth”.
It’s All in the Timing
Unlike its natural world counterparts, this ‘urban-life form’ represents a new type of organism -- one that can survive and grow by changing its conditions for growth. In the natural world, evolutionary change comes about through ‘chance and necessity’ over time scales that most often greatly exceed the life span of any creature, certainly the human one. These are geological time scales (although there is growing evidence of rapid natural selection of phenotypes in nature, typically small animals and micro-organisms). Yet, emergent from human evolution and culture, we have this growing thing called a city, which must generate (of itself) cycles of change at a rate far faster than nature; at a rate much shorter than a human life span.
And therein lays the single major caveat to innovation-driven growth: the time between innovation cycles decreases as population increases. Thus major innovations (sufficient to sustain the city further) must come at an accelerated rate. This also means that our adaptations to these cycles must occur at a faster pace. But again, the share of the net gain from all this wealth, per capita, grows smaller with time. It is small wonder that we walk faster in bigger cities. Small wonder as well that heart disease -- and its stress-augmented family of symptoms -- is the leading killer in modern societies.
These mathematical models are consistent with observations of real-world cities and their rates of change of population and technological growth. The three key equations developed by the research team could be analytically applied to our all of our contemporary municipalities -- and thereby determine, or predict, which are approaching stagnation, collapsing, or even (possibly) recovering. This information, if widely known and reported, could also lead to new, mass migratory patterns, giving us a situation in which the numerical values used to map our movements will now come to guide our (mass) movements.
From Complexity to Chaos is but a Step
We may begin to see a rather terminal pattern, or ‘positive feedback cycle’, going on here. Indeed, many of the equations used in this study are similar in structure to the differential equations used in the science of Chaos. A chaotic, or dynamic, system exhibits a ‘reiterative’ behavior identified with positive feedback cycling. In biological systems, chaos is viewed by some as a “possibility generating mechanism” for evolutionary change (see: Ilya Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos). I will also note that scaling similarity is a feature of fractals (i.e., ‘self-similarity’), one of the more beautiful manifestations of chaotic evolution. So then, if our “new kind of urban organism” is, at its base, governed by some deeper biological principle (perhaps akin to Prigogine’s Nobel-winning theory of ‘dissipative structuring’), then perhaps this voracious feedback cycle will drive it, ultimately, towards the achievement of a “higher order”, and so may it continue, reformed.
To clarify: a ‘dynamic system’ is defined as having more than one equilibrium state. Given this definition, it is difficult to see any such higher order -- or new equilibrium state -- emerging that is not simultaneously and deeply rooted in a new, global, ecological order and awareness (this would comport with the aforementioned ‘new arrangements of ecological relationships’). We are not simply a part of a larger organism, we are creating the organism -- we are its ‘metabolic’ system -- and likewise the very thing that ‘drives us’.
As an artist and creative person, I hesitate to add: this research may also indicate that too much commerce-oriented creativity (and its by-products: innovation and wealth) may not be such a good thing -- given its noted contribution to unsustainable growth. Human innovation must, it seems, be constrained; it must be linked with the rightful scale and nature of things. Perhaps also, priority should be placed on equitable wealth distribution.
Ultimately, the pace of innovative change must needs to mesh with the human psyche, as it has emerged in nature and culture. Granted “a certain power to alter things adheres in the human soul” (Albertus Magnus); it may be our nature to create, ceaselessly. But perhaps we could apply this ancient theorem to our own human natures, and thus alter ourselves*, our growth patterns. This may be the true and ultimate arena of human innovation.
It is also a truism that our ‘things’ come to control us. The city, which is our biggest created thing, can quickly become our harshest task master. But how often do we slow down to notice what’s driving us? As any jogger or long-distance runner knows, if you don’t stop running, eventually you will collapse.
*This includes any inventions that may alter us, such as Artificial Intelligence. Will Artificial Intelligence (AI) enable a more sustainable refashioning of urban-driven human culture or nature?
Michael A. Ricciardi
References:
Luís M. A. Bettencourt et al, ‘Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities’; Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, April, 2007.
Ilya Prigogine (with Isabell Stengers), Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue With Nature, A Bantam Book, April, 1984.