5 ms·

Cities are living entities always changing and adapting to new environments

73 points by dbaboci 6y ago

hungryforcodes 6y ago
Robert Pirsing's second book -- Lila -- had this as a major theme. He talked about how cities, by having people living in them, created almost a new life form. Much like our bodies are just a collection of cells, that together create a new life (humans), based on emergent behaviour.
Timberwolf 6y ago
It's been a long time but I'm sure I remember something along similar themes being one of the essays in the back of the SimCity 2000 manual. Which now makes me all nostalgic for the days when game manuals were something existing at the confluence between readme, strategy guide and just plain good reading matter.
- dbaboci 6y ago
  heh, reminded me of these big beautiful boxes CD games used to come in.
- gogopuppygogo 6y ago
  LGR makes a point to talk about those manuals on their YouTube show.
_ah 6y ago
This is also why NIMBYism is such a problem. No city is static... it is either growing or dying. Often both, simultaneously. If the ability to change is constrained, the city-organism is more likely to die as conditions change.
- nostromo 6y ago
  It's just a feature of self-governance. The citizens of a city get to decide its future. A lot of people in cities will like them the way they are and resist changes they don't like. That's fine; that's democracy in action. The people that don't live there but would like to may not like it, but the local government has no obligation to represent them. Cities that want to grow can court them instead. Besides, there have been lots of great NIMBYs over the years. The ones that saved Paris from Le Corbusier's modernization plan "Plan Voisin"[1], or the ones that saved Seattle from having about 500% more interstates than it needed[2]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Voisin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Voisin 2. https://i.imgur.com/i158aQd.jpg https://i.imgur.com/i158aQd.jpg
  - opportune 6y ago
    "The people that don't live there but would like to may not like it" What about the people that live there renting, or who work there, and can't afford a home? To me your argument is essentially saying because people have voted this way, that means it must be good. That is not really an argument or position other than that you don't care about the issue. The big issue with the bay area is a huge mismatch with where housing is and where jobs (or offices and commercial activity, whatever) are. That is not something the "free market of cities" competing for people can solve like you think it can. Those jobs and people already exist, and the mismatch fundamentally makes things worse.
    - rightbyte 6y ago
      Unless you have a rent controlled apartment or a inherited home I would say the Bay area is mainly cycling through fools that has not yet realised it is not working out it in the long term. When I lived and worked there it took like half a year before I realized there were almost no kids. It is not a place where people really want to live. https://www.sfgate.com/mommyfiles/article/Many-families-leave-San-Francisco-but-what-about-10887001.php https://www.sfgate.com/mommyfiles/article/Many-families-leav...
      - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
        That’s for the city of San Francisco. Not the Bay Area. There are plenty of kids in SF Bay Area. Maybe if SF made a priority to resolve safety and homelessness in the city, more people would want to live there. Raising kids is expensive enough and why do it in a place where they want to tax you to death with no relatable or relevant benefit.
  - t-writescode 6y ago
    As a Seatteite, that second picture looks great; and, it’s reflected instead in some junky, but very wide roads where many of those interstates would have been. 99 is a 40mph highway in many places, and the viaduct previously supported huge amounts of traffic. The West Seattle bridge and its associated highway is on there, too.
DoreenMichele 6y ago
One of the reasons suburban patterns of development are a problem is because it limits adaptability. A healthy city allows for stable neighborhoods by making it feasible for someone to change jobs as needed without necessarily moving. (This is probably not some kind of original thought on my part. I read this somewhere long ago -- though I may be mashing together two thoughts from distinct sources. I just don't recall the source/sources.)
- dbaboci 6y ago
  Alain Bertaud addresses cities as labor markets in Order Without Design. A talk a bit about it here: https://thinkthinkthink.substack.com/p/the-15-minute-city-thinkthinkthink https://thinkthinkthink.substack.com/p/the-15-minute-city-th... Most importantly however cities serve as highly efficient labor markets - they connect a varied and interdependent labor force to diverse work opportunities. Most of commuting and corollary congestion happens at rush hour: the time when people travel from home to work and vice versa. In the above diagram from Order Without Design, Marie-Agnes & Alain Bertaud skillfully illustrates the key connection between home, work/entertainment and speed of travel. The 15-minute city should attempt to minimize inconvenient & needless travel, while offering speedy access to jobs and amenities regardless of the place of residence. The traditional central business district is somewhat efficient in this sense; polycentric planning needs to figure out how it can keep the efficiencies of a central business district while offering the comfort of a walkable neighborhood. Even if all super-creatives work from home, that still leaves 88% of the labor force which needs to move around. Swift mobility will be a key aspect of urban living for the foreseeable future and a crucial determinant to the success of polycentric cities.
thatsecurityguy 6y ago
This title reminds me of that sandman comic.
- jelliclesfarm 6y ago
  Which one?
9214 6y ago
Christopher Alexander's "The Nature of Order" comes to mind, where he makes similar points WRT urban architecture and patterns of cities' growth. Manuel De Landa made a phenomenal analysis of European cities as dissipative structures in "1000 Years of Non-Linear History", covering both ecological, geological and linguistic aspects of their development.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jelliclesfarm 6y ago
Interesting perspective. I don’t think cities should be adaptable to change. Most city models should be abandoned and new models created. Features of the older model can be reused. The notion that cities should be designed to be adaptable and are ‘living entities always changing’ comes from a world view that puts non living entities of cities like buildings and roads and infrastructure over living entities. Like humans, habitat, wild life and environment. Here capitalism and materialism trump over stable environments for living. Families, businesses and even nature needs stability. Stability doesn’t exclude adaptability but it requires a certain amount of static ‘non-changeablity’. The problem at hand is: 1. Workforce has become migratory. 2. A lack of transport network and infrastructure is blurring all kinds of lines between urban, suburban and rural. This is an uniquely American problem esp in cities where govt doesn’t invest in transportation infrastructure. Cities should be stable. People should adaptable if they want freedom of movement. If you want cities to be living entities, then the citizens should curtail migration in and out. It’s an either/or situation. Such a binary approach would ensure that we have less of inequalities, unaffordability, exploitation of resources an destruction of eco systems. Trying to be a migratory populace AND wanting to have adaptable cities is a recipe of disaster and strife as we have all seen in recent times.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > The notion that cities should be designed to be adaptable and are ‘living entities always changing’ comes from a world view that puts non living entities of cities like buildings and roads and infrastructure over living entities No, it's the exact opposite. Adaptable cities adapt to serve the changing needs of the people living in them. This is better just building new ones with different features when the old features are found to be inadequate because: (1) Geography (access to fresh water, natural trade routes, climate) matters for cities, and the good places to site cities are mostly taken, (2) The people least well served by an existing city design will naturally be the least free to abandon the city for a new one. > . If you want cities to be living entities, then the citizens should curtail migration in and out I see no rationale for this. You repeat it multiple times, but without clear reasoning.
  - 6y ago
filoeleven 6y ago
Cities are not all living entities, but given the right conditions they can be born. There are also however inter-dimensional predators that seek them out to consume while they are new and vulnerable, so the cities choose people who embody them to raise up as avatars and protect them. At least, that’s the premise in N.K. Jemisin’s _The City We Became_, which I tore through quickly and am eagerly awaiting the rest of the trilogy.
AtlasBarfed 6y ago
Sufficiently large cities,much like sufficiently large companies, fall into the tight hierarchical management and red tape. Basic services become more expensive and less effective. This also mirrors large enterprises, especially in things like IT services for providing infrastructure before AWS started hollowing them out. In large enterprises with a dozen different datacenters (often from acquisitions and mergers), I never understood why these assets were placed under the same management and policy. Instead, the opportunity to provide internal services competition was ignored, with two or even three or four different infrastructure provider services competing to serve IT systems and applications. Likewise, in a large enough city you could have competing services for snow plowing, garbage collection, pothole maintenance, and even if you don't have consumer choice or transparency, have a relatively cheap oversight group rate and reallocate funding. School choice has been pretty popular in cities. And when privatization occurs... why go all in? Use it for competition, not replacement. Although charter schools have been generally a failure of policy if we use that as an example of this strategy.

73 points by dbaboci 6y ago

Robert Pirsing's second book -- Lila -- had this as a major theme. He talked about how cities, by having people living in them, created almost a new life form. Much like our bodies are just a collection of cells, that together create a new life (humans), based on emergent behaviour.

Timberwolf 6y ago

It's been a long time but I'm sure I remember something along similar themes being one of the essays in the back of the SimCity 2000 manual. Which now makes me all nostalgic for the days when game manuals were something existing at the confluence between readme, strategy guide and just plain good reading matter.

dbaboci 6y ago
heh, reminded me of these big beautiful boxes CD games used to come in.
gogopuppygogo 6y ago
LGR makes a point to talk about those manuals on their YouTube show.

_ah 6y ago

This is also why NIMBYism is such a problem. No city is static... it is either growing or dying. Often both, simultaneously. If the ability to change is constrained, the city-organism is more likely to die as conditions change.

nostromo 6y ago
It's just a feature of self-governance. The citizens of a city get to decide its future. A lot of people in cities will like them the way they are and resist changes they don't like. That's fine; that's democracy in action. The people that don't live there but would like to may not like it, but the local government has no obligation to represent them. Cities that want to grow can court them instead. Besides, there have been lots of great NIMBYs over the years. The ones that saved Paris from Le Corbusier's modernization plan "Plan Voisin"[1], or the ones that saved Seattle from having about 500% more interstates than it needed[2]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Voisin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Voisin 2. https://i.imgur.com/i158aQd.jpg https://i.imgur.com/i158aQd.jpg
- opportune 6y ago
  "The people that don't live there but would like to may not like it" What about the people that live there renting, or who work there, and can't afford a home? To me your argument is essentially saying because people have voted this way, that means it must be good. That is not really an argument or position other than that you don't care about the issue. The big issue with the bay area is a huge mismatch with where housing is and where jobs (or offices and commercial activity, whatever) are. That is not something the "free market of cities" competing for people can solve like you think it can. Those jobs and people already exist, and the mismatch fundamentally makes things worse.
  - rightbyte 6y ago
    Unless you have a rent controlled apartment or a inherited home I would say the Bay area is mainly cycling through fools that has not yet realised it is not working out it in the long term. When I lived and worked there it took like half a year before I realized there were almost no kids. It is not a place where people really want to live. https://www.sfgate.com/mommyfiles/article/Many-families-leave-San-Francisco-but-what-about-10887001.php https://www.sfgate.com/mommyfiles/article/Many-families-leav...
    - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
      That’s for the city of San Francisco. Not the Bay Area. There are plenty of kids in SF Bay Area. Maybe if SF made a priority to resolve safety and homelessness in the city, more people would want to live there. Raising kids is expensive enough and why do it in a place where they want to tax you to death with no relatable or relevant benefit.
- t-writescode 6y ago
  As a Seatteite, that second picture looks great; and, it’s reflected instead in some junky, but very wide roads where many of those interstates would have been. 99 is a 40mph highway in many places, and the viaduct previously supported huge amounts of traffic. The West Seattle bridge and its associated highway is on there, too.

DoreenMichele 6y ago

One of the reasons suburban patterns of development are a problem is because it limits adaptability. A healthy city allows for stable neighborhoods by making it feasible for someone to change jobs as needed without necessarily moving. (This is probably not some kind of original thought on my part. I read this somewhere long ago -- though I may be mashing together two thoughts from distinct sources. I just don't recall the source/sources.)

dbaboci 6y ago
Alain Bertaud addresses cities as labor markets in Order Without Design. A talk a bit about it here: https://thinkthinkthink.substack.com/p/the-15-minute-city-thinkthinkthink https://thinkthinkthink.substack.com/p/the-15-minute-city-th... Most importantly however cities serve as highly efficient labor markets - they connect a varied and interdependent labor force to diverse work opportunities. Most of commuting and corollary congestion happens at rush hour: the time when people travel from home to work and vice versa. In the above diagram from Order Without Design, Marie-Agnes & Alain Bertaud skillfully illustrates the key connection between home, work/entertainment and speed of travel. The 15-minute city should attempt to minimize inconvenient & needless travel, while offering speedy access to jobs and amenities regardless of the place of residence. The traditional central business district is somewhat efficient in this sense; polycentric planning needs to figure out how it can keep the efficiencies of a central business district while offering the comfort of a walkable neighborhood. Even if all super-creatives work from home, that still leaves 88% of the labor force which needs to move around. Swift mobility will be a key aspect of urban living for the foreseeable future and a crucial determinant to the success of polycentric cities.

thatsecurityguy 6y ago

This title reminds me of that sandman comic.

jelliclesfarm 6y ago
Which one?

9214 6y ago

Christopher Alexander's "The Nature of Order" comes to mind, where he makes similar points WRT urban architecture and patterns of cities' growth. Manuel De Landa made a phenomenal analysis of European cities as dissipative structures in "1000 Years of Non-Linear History", covering both ecological, geological and linguistic aspects of their development.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jelliclesfarm 6y ago

Interesting perspective. I don’t think cities should be adaptable to change. Most city models should be abandoned and new models created. Features of the older model can be reused. The notion that cities should be designed to be adaptable and are ‘living entities always changing’ comes from a world view that puts non living entities of cities like buildings and roads and infrastructure over living entities. Like humans, habitat, wild life and environment. Here capitalism and materialism trump over stable environments for living. Families, businesses and even nature needs stability. Stability doesn’t exclude adaptability but it requires a certain amount of static ‘non-changeablity’. The problem at hand is: 1. Workforce has become migratory. 2. A lack of transport network and infrastructure is blurring all kinds of lines between urban, suburban and rural. This is an uniquely American problem esp in cities where govt doesn’t invest in transportation infrastructure. Cities should be stable. People should adaptable if they want freedom of movement. If you want cities to be living entities, then the citizens should curtail migration in and out. It’s an either/or situation. Such a binary approach would ensure that we have less of inequalities, unaffordability, exploitation of resources an destruction of eco systems. Trying to be a migratory populace AND wanting to have adaptable cities is a recipe of disaster and strife as we have all seen in recent times.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> The notion that cities should be designed to be adaptable and are ‘living entities always changing’ comes from a world view that puts non living entities of cities like buildings and roads and infrastructure over living entities No, it's the exact opposite. Adaptable cities adapt to serve the changing needs of the people living in them. This is better just building new ones with different features when the old features are found to be inadequate because: (1) Geography (access to fresh water, natural trade routes, climate) matters for cities, and the good places to site cities are mostly taken, (2) The people least well served by an existing city design will naturally be the least free to abandon the city for a new one. > . If you want cities to be living entities, then the citizens should curtail migration in and out I see no rationale for this. You repeat it multiple times, but without clear reasoning.
- 6y ago

filoeleven 6y ago

Cities are not all living entities, but given the right conditions they can be born. There are also however inter-dimensional predators that seek them out to consume while they are new and vulnerable, so the cities choose people who embody them to raise up as avatars and protect them. At least, that’s the premise in N.K. Jemisin’s _The City We Became_, which I tore through quickly and am eagerly awaiting the rest of the trilogy.

AtlasBarfed 6y ago

Sufficiently large cities,much like sufficiently large companies, fall into the tight hierarchical management and red tape. Basic services become more expensive and less effective. This also mirrors large enterprises, especially in things like IT services for providing infrastructure before AWS started hollowing them out. In large enterprises with a dozen different datacenters (often from acquisitions and mergers), I never understood why these assets were placed under the same management and policy. Instead, the opportunity to provide internal services competition was ignored, with two or even three or four different infrastructure provider services competing to serve IT systems and applications. Likewise, in a large enough city you could have competing services for snow plowing, garbage collection, pothole maintenance, and even if you don't have consumer choice or transparency, have a relatively cheap oversight group rate and reallocate funding. School choice has been pretty popular in cities. And when privatization occurs... why go all in? Use it for competition, not replacement. Although charter schools have been generally a failure of policy if we use that as an example of this strategy.