7 ms·

Are Cities Too Complicated?

109 points by state_machine 10y ago

wellpast 10y ago
> The Entanglement is a term from the computer scientist Danny Hillis, referring to a new era of technology that we find ourselves in, where no single individual can possibly understand what we ourselves have constructed. In other words, when even the experts are unable to fully grasp a system that they might have been themselves involved in the construction of, we are in a new era of incomprehensibility. This is not a phenomenon of just cities or other large societal systems. In my experience, this is already true for many a single company.
- jandrese 10y ago
  It's true for life in general. It is a rare luxury to have and understand all of the information before being asked to make a decision. This is why fields like economics have traditionally been poor predictors of actual human activity, they assume an ideal that is rarely true.
  - NTDF9 10y ago
    Reminds me of the trope that the choice should ALWAYS be left with consumers. Every consumer is a 'rational actor'. Reality is most humans have too many things going on, too many choices with not adequate info and are emotional actors.
    - devereaux 10y ago
      Yet solutions emerge, even if individual agents have zero intelligence http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/Gode%20and%20Sunder-JPE.pdf http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/Gode%20and%20Sunder-JP... Your lack of belief in the force of the free hand is troubling, especially when it can be proved by computer models and reality.
      - coddingtonbear 10y ago
        To clarify for the person you've responded to: the problem with humans isn't exactly that we individually have _too little_ intelligence, it's that the heuristics we have evolved to use for compensating for missing information include a great deal of bias. This results in the very-well-documented lack of rational actors in the real world.
    - scsilver 10y ago
      Not to mention the distortion of rationality created by advertising.
- tdy721 10y ago
  That is a great term. I believe it can also be extended to devices like modern computers. They are now complex enough that no single person can understand all the parts of the system. Now I have a word for it, thanks!
Elof 10y ago
John Edgar (former VP Strategy at DigitalOcean) and his team are working on and writing about this extensively >> medium.com/city-as-a-service/
- strictnein 10y ago
  Just being helpful: http://medium.com/city-as-a-service/ http://medium.com/city-as-a-service/
tsunamifury 10y ago
This is the fundamental premise that object oriented thinking was created to solve. You cannot understand a sufficiently advanced system from both an overview and granular view. You have to either see the overview and trust the granular objects, or specialize in one granular object and then trust your adjacent objects. Its a problem written about in detail by Marcus Aurelius in Meditations when he comments on running an empire. He notes that the most difficult part is not having information in a timely fashion at scale -- you can either have timely information about a single place, or out of date information about the entire empire. They key part in both is trust and responsibility. You must trust that granular objects can take responsibility for themselves. If each one requires knowledge of the entire system to function, then the weight of that will overburden any system over time.
- Elof 10y ago
  I think there is an important art in recognizing signal over noise and being pragmatic when considering how to design a system. I think you're right about trust, but I would add in a focus on fundamentals/first principles over design.
- pdkl95 10y ago
  > If each one requires knowledge of the entire system The general problem is the growing number of dependencies. James Burke in "Connections" warned that civilization is an interconnected web of technology traps[1]. We survive as long as everything works (or "mostly" works), but there is a risk of cascade failure. More recently, Dan Geer warned[2] about the same type of problem: In the last couple of years, I've found that institutions that I more or less must use [...] no longer accept paper letter they each only accept digital delivery of such instructions. This means that each of them has created a critical dependence on an Internet swarming with men in the middle and, which is more, they have doubtlessly given up their own ability to fall back to what worked for a century before. [...] Everything in meatspace we give over to cyberspace replaces dependencies that are local and manageable with dependencies that are certainly not local and I would argue much less manageable because they are much less secure. I say that because the root cause of risk is dependence, and most especially dependence on expectations of system state. [...] Accommodating old methods and Internet rejectionists preserves alternate, less complex, more durable means and therefore bounds dependence. Bounding dependence is *the* core of rational risk management. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKELMR6wACw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKELMR6wACw [2] http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt
kazinator 10y ago
Betteridge's law is fumbling here: yes, perhaps they are. Big, old cities are full of ancient infrastructure that slips through the cracks. People depend on it, and nobody knows exactly where its networks are routed; then when it breaks, it's a big disaster.
- ItsDeathball 10y ago
  On the other hand, perhaps the answer is that they're just complicated enough. If the big, old cities didn't provide a unique economic advantage through their increased interconnectivity then no one would stick around to tolerate that ancient infrastructure.
  - devereaux 10y ago
    Huh, path dependance. By virtue of existence and being big enough, they are worth sticking to.
tomkat0789 10y ago
I don't know how useful biological ideas will be to urban planning, but this sentence tickled my brain: "...This can include such things as cataloging bugs and unexpected behaviors in our infrastructure (like how a naturalist might collect insects)" This sounds like what anybody working on a computer can use at a place like Stack Overflow. People have problems, post a description of it, and somebody else who happens to know helps them. The result of this process is available to others on the web who might have a similar issue.
- pjc50 10y ago
  e.g. https://www.fixmystreet.com/ https://www.fixmystreet.com/
ngrilly 10y ago
The article doesn't answer the question stated in the title.
- khedoros 10y ago
  I see statements equivalent to these in the article: - Cities are inefficient Rube-Goldberg contraptions - Portions of city systems are too complex for one person to understand - We see evidence of complex, unpredictable systems when things go wrong - Cities have multiple complex systems that can and do produce unpredictable failures - Methods inspired by scientific study may help us improve city life I'd summarize it as: Here are some problems caused by complexity, and here are some (vague) ideas for how to fix them. From the article's content, I think there's an implied "yes" answer to the title.
- elliotec 10y ago
  I think it's a rhetorical question, with the article's answer being something along the lines of "Cities are possibly too complicated for humans to understand at a holistic level," which seems almost obvious.
- x3n0ph3n3 10y ago
  > Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word "no." [1] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
mwsherman 10y ago
Another word for complexity is diversity. Resilience comes from that complexity. Very much like biology. NYC (where I live) is wildly inefficient, except at delivering benefits that millions of people consider worthwhile.
- endswapper 10y ago
  Your point is a step in the right direction. Life is complex and diverse. Cities serve as models. Daily life is a test of the inputs and results. Every day they can be reconfigured and the data analyzed.
jondubois 10y ago
Cities have a dark side. I think that most people who grew up in a small town and later moved to a big city have gone through a period of disillusionment.
- wcummings 10y ago
  I don't want to seem mean, but you're like a caricature of a country person. People are living things which grow to suit their environment, everyone thinks their way is the best way and that their hometown is the coolest. When you say things like "city people care more about money" and "city people are mean" you sound like a bumpkin.
  - jomamaxx 10y ago
    Maybe he's a caricature, but he's 100% right. I grew up going to school in the burbs, all summer in a small home-town - and have lived in several major cities. 'City people' are definitely more about the money. Small towns are communities. Everyone knows everyone - often for multiple generations. Families have ties - not just people. You can't 'not care about' someone you've known for 40 years, even if you don't know them that well. In cities, people are exposed to a lot more people, they have tons of 'associates' but very few friends. People come and go - and they get individualist. I find city people, having been exposed to 'more kinds of people' tend to be more 'tolerant' in the modern sense of that word, but have absolutely no idea what community means and are far more judgemental, ideological, selective in everything. City people walk and talk with a kind of 'facade' - they are trying to project an image - almost all of them. In a small town - this would seem ridiculous. Also in small towns - when people speak to you - they are speaking to you then are 'present'. In the city, people are usually polite - but conversations (and relationships) 'transactional'. My brother (small town) threw a big bar-b-q for his friends birthday, and invited a bunch of people. Some really odd red-necky types showed up - and don't mean negative - just poor. They were welcome. Old guys in wheelchairs. Young partiers. It was an unbelievably mixed crowd. I don't think my brother would have preferred they came - but there is no way on earth anyone would say anything - after all 'it's joe from the corner store' - and 'Mary, Sean from across the streets Aunt'. When you go to social gatherings in urban areas - they tend to be hyper-specific in terms of social groupings. Even the near-homeless/poor people in small towns 'know someone' and most people 'know them' by name. Down the street from where I live (urban) - there are a couple of completely 'nameless' homeless people. Also - small town people tend to have a lot of gatherings where it's mostly family. In the city, often less so. When you hang around mostly your family and extended friends, it's a completely different world from 'people your age in your clique' etc.. The craziest thing about this - is 'city people' often have absolutely no idea what a community actually is. They make all sorts of crazy assertions, but have no clue. You call this guy a 'bumpkin' because - no offence - you might not know what he is talking about - also - your comment might be a kind of bigotry. In the suburb where I grew up - I don't know anyone. They've all moved. I have some contact - but the people, stores, restaurants, neighbourhood - totally unrecognizable. My 'hometown' - I still know some people, epc. through family. It's incredibly boring, and would be nary impossible to live there (it would be nice if it were a commute from a city), but if I don't go back often enough, I go crazy. To someone from a small town, living in a city often feels like 'living in a corporation' - and to some extent they are correct.
sturadnidge 10y ago
Joseph Tainter has done some interesting work on the relation between societal complexity and collapse[1], here's a recent(ish) paper of his on the subject http://wtf.tw/ref/tainter_2006.pdf http://wtf.tw/ref/tainter_2006.pdf [1] https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-Archaeology/dp/052138673X https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-Ar...
dredmorbius 10y ago
Can anyone with access to the book please answer whether or not Geoffrey West, Joseph Tainter, or W. Brian Arther are among the cited references? I'm flipping quickly through a copy of Arbesman's The Half-Life of Facts and am disappointed to see that he (or his editors) have fallen prey to the gross misconception that numbered footnotes and bibliographies somehow diminish a book's value. Quite the opposite. (THLoF has end notes, but they're not indicated within the text, and insted reference pages and passages, which is a form of torture to be included in a future revision of the Geneva Convention.)
FrozenVoid 10y ago
They are often overcomplicated due lack of planning(environmental, ergonomics/accessibility), ad-hoc building design driven by commercial interest and persistent ignorance of users(cities are user-unfriendly) needs. Unless the bureaucrats are faced with public anger/complaints they would defer to major companies and investors opinion of what the city needs. While some problems like fracking are really noticeable(creating wide-spread publicity), the corporate power creep seems invisible to average joe who blissfully thinks the city is made for him. Infrastructure is not actually people-centric, its built to maximize utility/efficiency providing minimum standard that is "acceptable" instead of striving to improve the city(solving the problem the quick way).
contingencies 10y ago
Use the right kind of probe to see the right level of detail. - Mark Burgess Make our comprehension of the world more manageable by limiting the amount of information we have to interact with at any time. Our experience of the world can be made comprehensible, or incomprehensible, by design. - Mark Burgess The effect of limited information is that we perceive and build the world as a collection of containers, patches or environments, separated from one another by limited information flow. These structures define characteristic scales. - Mark Burgess The more details we can see, the less we have a sense of control. - Mark Burgess Separation of concerns ... a necessary consequence of loss of resolution due to scale ... a strategy for staying sane. - Mark Burgess These quotes are all from In Search of Certainty: The Science of Our Information Infrastructure (2013), via my fortune database https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
yason 10y ago
Cities have developed in a complex and often fascinating manner, but along the way, we have portions of these systems that are more complex than any single person can understand. Just like life itself.

109 points by state_machine 10y ago

> The Entanglement is a term from the computer scientist Danny Hillis, referring to a new era of technology that we find ourselves in, where no single individual can possibly understand what we ourselves have constructed. In other words, when even the experts are unable to fully grasp a system that they might have been themselves involved in the construction of, we are in a new era of incomprehensibility. This is not a phenomenon of just cities or other large societal systems. In my experience, this is already true for many a single company.

jandrese 10y ago
It's true for life in general. It is a rare luxury to have and understand all of the information before being asked to make a decision. This is why fields like economics have traditionally been poor predictors of actual human activity, they assume an ideal that is rarely true.
- NTDF9 10y ago
  Reminds me of the trope that the choice should ALWAYS be left with consumers. Every consumer is a 'rational actor'. Reality is most humans have too many things going on, too many choices with not adequate info and are emotional actors.
  - devereaux 10y ago
    Yet solutions emerge, even if individual agents have zero intelligence http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/Gode%20and%20Sunder-JPE.pdf http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/Gode%20and%20Sunder-JP... Your lack of belief in the force of the free hand is troubling, especially when it can be proved by computer models and reality.
    - coddingtonbear 10y ago
      To clarify for the person you've responded to: the problem with humans isn't exactly that we individually have _too little_ intelligence, it's that the heuristics we have evolved to use for compensating for missing information include a great deal of bias. This results in the very-well-documented lack of rational actors in the real world.
  - scsilver 10y ago
    Not to mention the distortion of rationality created by advertising.
tdy721 10y ago
That is a great term. I believe it can also be extended to devices like modern computers. They are now complex enough that no single person can understand all the parts of the system. Now I have a word for it, thanks!

Elof 10y ago

John Edgar (former VP Strategy at DigitalOcean) and his team are working on and writing about this extensively >> medium.com/city-as-a-service/

strictnein 10y ago
Just being helpful: http://medium.com/city-as-a-service/ http://medium.com/city-as-a-service/

tsunamifury 10y ago

This is the fundamental premise that object oriented thinking was created to solve. You cannot understand a sufficiently advanced system from both an overview and granular view. You have to either see the overview and trust the granular objects, or specialize in one granular object and then trust your adjacent objects. Its a problem written about in detail by Marcus Aurelius in Meditations when he comments on running an empire. He notes that the most difficult part is not having information in a timely fashion at scale -- you can either have timely information about a single place, or out of date information about the entire empire. They key part in both is trust and responsibility. You must trust that granular objects can take responsibility for themselves. If each one requires knowledge of the entire system to function, then the weight of that will overburden any system over time.

Elof 10y ago
I think there is an important art in recognizing signal over noise and being pragmatic when considering how to design a system. I think you're right about trust, but I would add in a focus on fundamentals/first principles over design.
pdkl95 10y ago
> If each one requires knowledge of the entire system The general problem is the growing number of dependencies. James Burke in "Connections" warned that civilization is an interconnected web of technology traps[1]. We survive as long as everything works (or "mostly" works), but there is a risk of cascade failure. More recently, Dan Geer warned[2] about the same type of problem: In the last couple of years, I've found that institutions that I more or less must use [...] no longer accept paper letter they each only accept digital delivery of such instructions. This means that each of them has created a critical dependence on an Internet swarming with men in the middle and, which is more, they have doubtlessly given up their own ability to fall back to what worked for a century before. [...] Everything in meatspace we give over to cyberspace replaces dependencies that are local and manageable with dependencies that are certainly not local and I would argue much less manageable because they are much less secure. I say that because the root cause of risk is dependence, and most especially dependence on expectations of system state. [...] Accommodating old methods and Internet rejectionists preserves alternate, less complex, more durable means and therefore bounds dependence. Bounding dependence is *the* core of rational risk management. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKELMR6wACw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKELMR6wACw [2] http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt

kazinator 10y ago

Betteridge's law is fumbling here: yes, perhaps they are. Big, old cities are full of ancient infrastructure that slips through the cracks. People depend on it, and nobody knows exactly where its networks are routed; then when it breaks, it's a big disaster.

ItsDeathball 10y ago
On the other hand, perhaps the answer is that they're just complicated enough. If the big, old cities didn't provide a unique economic advantage through their increased interconnectivity then no one would stick around to tolerate that ancient infrastructure.
- devereaux 10y ago
  Huh, path dependance. By virtue of existence and being big enough, they are worth sticking to.

tomkat0789 10y ago

I don't know how useful biological ideas will be to urban planning, but this sentence tickled my brain: "...This can include such things as cataloging bugs and unexpected behaviors in our infrastructure (like how a naturalist might collect insects)" This sounds like what anybody working on a computer can use at a place like Stack Overflow. People have problems, post a description of it, and somebody else who happens to know helps them. The result of this process is available to others on the web who might have a similar issue.

pjc50 10y ago
e.g. https://www.fixmystreet.com/ https://www.fixmystreet.com/

ngrilly 10y ago

The article doesn't answer the question stated in the title.

khedoros 10y ago
I see statements equivalent to these in the article: - Cities are inefficient Rube-Goldberg contraptions - Portions of city systems are too complex for one person to understand - We see evidence of complex, unpredictable systems when things go wrong - Cities have multiple complex systems that can and do produce unpredictable failures - Methods inspired by scientific study may help us improve city life I'd summarize it as: Here are some problems caused by complexity, and here are some (vague) ideas for how to fix them. From the article's content, I think there's an implied "yes" answer to the title.
elliotec 10y ago
I think it's a rhetorical question, with the article's answer being something along the lines of "Cities are possibly too complicated for humans to understand at a holistic level," which seems almost obvious.
x3n0ph3n3 10y ago
> Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word "no." [1] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

mwsherman 10y ago

Another word for complexity is diversity. Resilience comes from that complexity. Very much like biology. NYC (where I live) is wildly inefficient, except at delivering benefits that millions of people consider worthwhile.

endswapper 10y ago
Your point is a step in the right direction. Life is complex and diverse. Cities serve as models. Daily life is a test of the inputs and results. Every day they can be reconfigured and the data analyzed.

jondubois 10y ago

Cities have a dark side. I think that most people who grew up in a small town and later moved to a big city have gone through a period of disillusionment.

wcummings 10y ago
I don't want to seem mean, but you're like a caricature of a country person. People are living things which grow to suit their environment, everyone thinks their way is the best way and that their hometown is the coolest. When you say things like "city people care more about money" and "city people are mean" you sound like a bumpkin.
- jomamaxx 10y ago
  Maybe he's a caricature, but he's 100% right. I grew up going to school in the burbs, all summer in a small home-town - and have lived in several major cities. 'City people' are definitely more about the money. Small towns are communities. Everyone knows everyone - often for multiple generations. Families have ties - not just people. You can't 'not care about' someone you've known for 40 years, even if you don't know them that well. In cities, people are exposed to a lot more people, they have tons of 'associates' but very few friends. People come and go - and they get individualist. I find city people, having been exposed to 'more kinds of people' tend to be more 'tolerant' in the modern sense of that word, but have absolutely no idea what community means and are far more judgemental, ideological, selective in everything. City people walk and talk with a kind of 'facade' - they are trying to project an image - almost all of them. In a small town - this would seem ridiculous. Also in small towns - when people speak to you - they are speaking to you then are 'present'. In the city, people are usually polite - but conversations (and relationships) 'transactional'. My brother (small town) threw a big bar-b-q for his friends birthday, and invited a bunch of people. Some really odd red-necky types showed up - and don't mean negative - just poor. They were welcome. Old guys in wheelchairs. Young partiers. It was an unbelievably mixed crowd. I don't think my brother would have preferred they came - but there is no way on earth anyone would say anything - after all 'it's joe from the corner store' - and 'Mary, Sean from across the streets Aunt'. When you go to social gatherings in urban areas - they tend to be hyper-specific in terms of social groupings. Even the near-homeless/poor people in small towns 'know someone' and most people 'know them' by name. Down the street from where I live (urban) - there are a couple of completely 'nameless' homeless people. Also - small town people tend to have a lot of gatherings where it's mostly family. In the city, often less so. When you hang around mostly your family and extended friends, it's a completely different world from 'people your age in your clique' etc.. The craziest thing about this - is 'city people' often have absolutely no idea what a community actually is. They make all sorts of crazy assertions, but have no clue. You call this guy a 'bumpkin' because - no offence - you might not know what he is talking about - also - your comment might be a kind of bigotry. In the suburb where I grew up - I don't know anyone. They've all moved. I have some contact - but the people, stores, restaurants, neighbourhood - totally unrecognizable. My 'hometown' - I still know some people, epc. through family. It's incredibly boring, and would be nary impossible to live there (it would be nice if it were a commute from a city), but if I don't go back often enough, I go crazy. To someone from a small town, living in a city often feels like 'living in a corporation' - and to some extent they are correct.

sturadnidge 10y ago

Joseph Tainter has done some interesting work on the relation between societal complexity and collapse[1], here's a recent(ish) paper of his on the subject http://wtf.tw/ref/tainter_2006.pdf http://wtf.tw/ref/tainter_2006.pdf [1] https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-Archaeology/dp/052138673X https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-Ar...

dredmorbius 10y ago

Can anyone with access to the book please answer whether or not Geoffrey West, Joseph Tainter, or W. Brian Arther are among the cited references? I'm flipping quickly through a copy of Arbesman's The Half-Life of Facts and am disappointed to see that he (or his editors) have fallen prey to the gross misconception that numbered footnotes and bibliographies somehow diminish a book's value. Quite the opposite. (THLoF has end notes, but they're not indicated within the text, and insted reference pages and passages, which is a form of torture to be included in a future revision of the Geneva Convention.)

FrozenVoid 10y ago

They are often overcomplicated due lack of planning(environmental, ergonomics/accessibility), ad-hoc building design driven by commercial interest and persistent ignorance of users(cities are user-unfriendly) needs. Unless the bureaucrats are faced with public anger/complaints they would defer to major companies and investors opinion of what the city needs. While some problems like fracking are really noticeable(creating wide-spread publicity), the corporate power creep seems invisible to average joe who blissfully thinks the city is made for him. Infrastructure is not actually people-centric, its built to maximize utility/efficiency providing minimum standard that is "acceptable" instead of striving to improve the city(solving the problem the quick way).

contingencies 10y ago

Use the right kind of probe to see the right level of detail. - Mark Burgess Make our comprehension of the world more manageable by limiting the amount of information we have to interact with at any time. Our experience of the world can be made comprehensible, or incomprehensible, by design. - Mark Burgess The effect of limited information is that we perceive and build the world as a collection of containers, patches or environments, separated from one another by limited information flow. These structures define characteristic scales. - Mark Burgess The more details we can see, the less we have a sense of control. - Mark Burgess Separation of concerns ... a necessary consequence of loss of resolution due to scale ... a strategy for staying sane. - Mark Burgess These quotes are all from In Search of Certainty: The Science of Our Information Infrastructure (2013), via my fortune database https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

yason 10y ago

Cities have developed in a complex and often fascinating manner, but along the way, we have portions of these systems that are more complex than any single person can understand. Just like life itself.