The Australian Ugliness, by Robin Boyd: (the above a “quality” institutional building at the university)

SO…

Written in 1960, it might have been professional courtesy to slog through old, familiar modernist dialogue.  Yet it did provide additional background info on the modernist movement, there is always more to be learned. Yes it provided an overview to the architectural development of Australia.  And true enough it is one of many fulcrums to balance ideas upon.

which ideas?

places people enjoy using

Design then becomes a non-issue.  It’s about economy of construction, using the right technology, and making a place that people really like.  Its not about “beauty.”  That emerges through careful execution of the work.

Is Featurism ugly? yes, and it persists in Australia.  Some may think it has been overcome in the last 50 years, but it is still visible.  Detailing could be better.  It is still Baroque, in that new building still are utilizing applied aggrandizement.  To some degree it actually appears as a complete waste of money… perhaps as a resource selling economy they have less need to be efficient with the use of public funds.  At the end of the day it is interesting, but there is nothing phenomenal… few things truly stunning, which will become held of value across decades.

Here are some notes:

Robin Boyd’s seminal book “The Australian Ugliness” while making some good observations, is really a ranting journey through twentieth century modernism’s complaints, and even more generally, a thorough analysis of an Other’s frustrating problem.  In a Zizek “Parallax,” Robin Boyd has succumbed to his own criticism:  the title of the book itself “Australian Ugliness” is a Featurist headline grabber, shocking to the local audience.  Instead of taking ownership of the issues within the architectural profession he shares, he poetically claim’s it’s an Other’s problem.

Consistent with twentieth century modernism’s broad scope dialogue, the Ugliness is Australian.  Suggested holistic solutions like educating the masses to eliminate bad taste are equally limited.  Boyd’s recurring theme of “Feature-ism” of course has some validity: many cultures use bright colors to highlight various elements on the landscape.  And it can be used to distract attention from other less desirable elements: trash bins etc.  However, at the other end of the extreme, not considered by Boyd, is the saturation of text, color, lights and images in retail strips.  When retailers are packed together relentlessly, eventually the smart seller, utilizes a clean black and white sign with limited text and plenty of blank space.  Such a “modern” aesthetic is simply a reaction against the norm, which then gathers attention.  Can this also be called “an assured product and a confident advertiser cooly presenting unassailable facts to produce a functional design” sure, but it does not necessarily follow that such a  design is “a genuine style and a calm advertisement.”

Boyd notes an Australian attitude of  cruel but kind  which he describes as: an insistence on freedom of the individual, yet acceptance of social restrictions beyond any democratic countries; a love of law, order and justice, yet accepting that crowds stone umpires and trip policemen on duty;  aggressively committed to equality, except for those immigrants notably different than themselves.  Eventually coming to the conclusion that Featurism emerges due to a lack of commitment to the world within which one lives.  Perhaps the logic comes from penal colony legacy: always a better job and life would be had back in Europe, when one becomes free? A different logic would be that non-commital decisions impacting ones environment are made for short duration, always able to trade-in for a different feature without fundamentally changing anything.

He then slips into highly difficult terrain “the only thing of meaning in art… ultimately the only satisfaction in life, lies in understanding oneself and making decisions accordingly.”  The corollary to Boyd’s statement, and his viewpoint, would be that Scandinavian people ultimately have more satisfaction in life because they understand themselves and make design decisions accordingly.  That kind of generalization would need some extremely thorough research if it was even possible to validate.

Meandering into the assumed architectural profession challenge, Boyd charts different modernist strategies to loosely deal with the task achieving, for every building in society, a unified, inspiring and artful result.  LeCorbusier’s Le Modulor, golden section proportioning system; Walter Gropius teamwork and collaboration to elevate the common taste of all persons involved in construction; Mies van der Rohe’s intellectually controlled technology; and Frank Lloyd Wright’s assertion that all designers eventually achieve his level of imagination, which none of the students at Taliesin ever achieved.  An ultimate cure for visual squalor suggested as redirection of public interest, through a better understanding of architecture’s aims and means.  Yet people with other occupations cannot be held liable.  Other occupations would then be holding architects responsible for the financial meltdown of 2008.

The cul de sac of thought can be found here: “the basic objection to Featurism: a moral objection… a Featurist object can never assist human awareness, wisdom and understanding.”  Again this generalization contains neither logic nor researched and documented facts.  Boyd tiptoes near two real facts, namely that technology and economy of our society will set the tone, as it always does. This leaves two means of construction: mass-produced economically sufficient housing and few costly custom-made monuments which generate financial returns by their notability.  He also notes the “housewife looking intent on finding some sort of homogeneity… focused on creating a delightful home” will always produce better results than the bargain-hunter who can never resist the draw of the oddments-counter in a furniture store.  Two ideas: economy and order, are signs of taste in a rapidly evolving, technology dominated, ecosystem of taste.

Which brings us to the problem with housing: people adapt to what is available.  What is available is determined by the society one lives within.  In Communist countries, people were lucky to get a place to live, be it high-rise or other, with a persons per dwelling unit ratio of approximately 4.  In over-extended America, circa 2005, people had multiple homes, be it suburban, weekend or high-rise, with a persons per dwelling unit ratio of approximately 1.  Thus making a home was very different in those different operational contexts.

The physical context, the development of dwelling units, can also be explored by looking at two different extremes: the Finish example and the American.  In the US, most homes are built by “builders” generally with no architectural training.  In addition, homes are conceived piecemeal: independent of the community because the builder has no motivation to consider the larger physical context.  Homes are advertised and sold according to the features they possess.  Importantly, homes are purchased as a financial investment, and resale will depend upon those features in fashion at the time of sale.

In Finland by contrast, homes are owned and built by the government according to regulations that support the long term operation of the community: multi-family housing must have a mix of ages from elderly to young in every complex.  Further buildings are designed by architects to withstand fashion trends since the government owns them, and will need to provide housing for many years forward.  Avoiding a situation where as Boyd declares “the ordinary man and woman with untrained, unopened eyes have… the same opportunity to parade his and her tastes in public” thus the government is responsible for creating communal environments. Following then, of course individuals properly can and do parade their own personal style with their interior decor, clothes, lifestyle and fashion accessories.

Boyd wanders into the ethics of good design because he is analyzing the current state of affairs and wishes that the world he lives within was different.  Wishing will not help it be different, the world is what it is, we can only build going forward.  Following is a brief rant about the current situation of the architectural profession in 2010.

The practice of architecture is not to provide psychoanalyst services for architects… any more than a lawsuit provides mental therapy to the winning party.  The purpose of architecture is to build for others.  It is a communal act, and as such, any emotional component is directed towards the community, and notable accomplishments are proven after the completed work has been shown to hold lasting value to other people through time.  After a century of individualism, capped by 20 years of privatized American triumphalism, it comes as no surprise that Featurism has yielded “starchitects” whose personalities are created and coddled in the media.  Many 2010 Featurist designs are created as personal therapy for the designer, and voyeurism for the public who becomes witness to the spectacle.

The Tiger Woods spectacle is just the most recent example of the our current societies lack of ability to distinguish between personal therapy and public voyeurism.  The point is that the media sells “personalities.”  Architecture is a team endeavour like many others, yet success often comes to those personalities that are most marketable, regardless of the value of the building to people using the spaces.  And this is

The rant may be true or questionable, however wishing it to be different won’t change it.  Building within the real situation today, is the only ways to provoke change.  Which, although Boyd’s thoughts are interesting, they ultimately offer us no meaningful direction in todays world of design.  As many before him, facing the daunting task of defining abstract concepts like beauty, he falls back on nature and morality.  The architectural design guidelines offered at the end of the book in 5 points is certainly agreeable to my tastes:

1. do not subordinate the whole to features of interest
2. be objectively scientific
3. encourage the advancement of technology
4. avoid emotional small talk
5. exceptions of position and function should be emotionally constructive without being irrelevant

But these claims offer no proscription for change.  They may be desired, wished for, but actions speak louder than words.

Table of Contents

The Australian Ugliness, by Robin Boyd:

1.

the descent into chaos

the featurist capital

2.

anglophiles and austericans

pioneers and arboraphobes

the non-featurists

the innocent era

3.

the pursuit of pleasingness

the ethics of anti-featurism

but it is getting closer…

one of those tasty drinks from last years party!

all parts for a purpose, details matter

Social phenomena.  Wealth and attitude.  Learning for a purpose.

Many articles regarding America’s “consumer culture” exist.  There are articles about America’s 40 year process of switching from “saving” money to “consuming” goods and services.  Saving has always had a purpose: for a rainy day, etc.  Consuming too has a purpose: food provides nourishment, homes provide shelter, even entertainment has some notional purpose.  Yet, at some point there is a limit: too much consuming, or even too much saving.

What about knowledge?  Human beings do save knowledge.  That began with the invention of the written word.  Libraries as the storehouse of knowledge, deposit one’s knowledge in a bank of knowledge.  Human beings also consume knowledge: “I devoured that book!” More specifically we consume knowledge when we create inventions… built on the shoulders of giants.  Inventions are the purposeful utilization of ideas that previously, haven’t been assembled in quite the same manner.

The analogy: we save and consume knowledge just like we save and consume money, goods and services.  Additionally there are limits to all of these functions.

Social media, social processes of education… going to the best schools because of the circle of friends found there.  Facebook didn’t emerge from the University of Phoenix.  What happens when the purpose of accumulating knowledge is simply to further one’s social standing?

Impress your friends with knowledge.  Dialogue is essential.  As any MBA can tell you, posturing etc. is all a part of getting what one wants from a situation.  Perhaps it is at “universities of higher education” where we learn these winning methods of dialogue which enable us to always win an intellectual argument. “Critical thinking skills” become simply using detailed knowledge coupled with conversational style points, to win an argument.  The following is an example from the end of an essay about the complexities of treating depression. After taking the reader through detailed examples and counter examples, the author throws his hands up and implies that you, dear reader, will never be able to comprehend all the complexities that the author has painstakingly researched:

Or do we resist the grief pill because we believe that bereavement is doing some work for us? Maybe we think that since we appear to have been naturally selected as creatures that mourn, we shouldn’t short-circuit the process. Or is it that we don’t want to be the kind of person who does not experience profound sorrow when someone we love dies? …. No science will ever answer them.

No one suggested that treating depression would be easy.  Of course it is difficult.  Yet over the last 10,000 years, human beings have proved their ability to understand and comprehend an ever increasing array of complex phenomena.  It was only a few centuries ago we scientifically believed in spirits and such, now we can explain solar eclipses, tectonic plate shifting, growth of bacteria, etc.  It is presumptuous to say “No science will ever answer them.” oh yeah… give us a few thousand years!

There is a change taking place.

America is no longer saving and storing knowledge for use: more patents are created in Asia than America.  But America has become a consumer of knowledge… consuming knowledge to win arguments with colleagues.  There are always exceptions.  In the following link provides two stories.  One about failing to innovate because companies wallow in “consuming knowledge to win arguments with colleagues.”  The second article is about inventing through careful and applied focus of knowledge on a problem. Utilizing knowledge from a storehouse, and assembling it in new ways to achieve a purpose.

focus and invention

from iPad presentation by Steve Jobs... why 600 & 1500?

Over the course of the last few weeks various ideas have crossed my path, and, as any pattern recognition device does, commonalities were found and are detailed below. The ideas are from Tony Judt, Italo Calvino & Samuel Bowles with Ugo Pagano. The +2 are recently found examples of the intersection of these ideas provided by Garry Kasparov Leonardo da Vinci. General descriptions and links to each of their contributions, are provided at the bottom of this post.  On a personal note, Tony Judt has terrible health problems and I send him my best. Nonetheless, I think when discussing the ideas it is better not to get distracted by the people behind them, but to focus on understanding the ideas. Therefore I will not refer to the ideas by authors, but instead acknowledge their work with appropriate credits and dive into the ideas at hand.

Three ideas:

1. a verbal argument for social policies
2. a data rich argument about possible social policies
3. a verbal argument for creativity

The thread that weaves them together is not the obvious literal one: social policies. Deeper than that is an idea about how human beings will operate in the future. Increased knowledge available and new tools to use this knowledge

• has implications for the Western view of the liberal arts
• will change our means of communication

In summary:

the verbal argument for better social policies is a normal viewpoint expressed by empathetic people across millenniums.  The terms and the references are updated for 2009, but basically this is the same old story heard as humans live their lives through natural calamities, such as wars and climatic disasters.  There is nothing wrong with it, but it doesn’t help our society make decisions about our future.  Fundamentally it is not breaking any new ground, it is only updating an argument that extends back thousands of years.

The data rich argument about possible social policies is a valiant attempt to understand the factors in our world that influence social policy.  It utilizes new technologies such as data gathering and mathematical models of dynamic systems, to understand these influences.  There is a certain amount of new thought put into it because it requires looking at the problem differently… even if just to use new tools.  Karl Marx did not have these tools so readily available.  It opens new vistas from which, one can look at social policies, and hopefully someday, change things in an effective manner.

The verbal argument for creativity is put forth in the following quotation about the ability to see, to conceptualize, new possibilities and the utilization of ideas as means to new achievements:

(However much effort they put into it, the two scriveners) are lacking in the kind of subjective gift that enables one to adapt ideas to the use one wishes to put them to, or to the gratuitous pleasure that one wishes to derive from them, a gift that cannot be learned from books.

Adapting and “putting to use” ideas for a new purpose is creativity.  Thousands of years ago, few people could read, which limited the ability to communicate through time and space.  As more and more humans gain more and more knowledge, we can communicate more complex thoughts, utilizing more complex tools (including advanced mathematics).  New tools and knowledge, has always changed how we communicate, it is just that, like everything else, the change is happening at an increasingly faster rate.

If that’s the summary, how long is the paper?!

Skip the body, here’s the conclusion:

The verbal argument for better social policies could not adapt ideas to the uses put forward: a personal goal of better health care, and a general goal of better societies. In a sense, there was not a new idea to adapt ideas to.  There was an old idea, universal this and that (health care), Western liberal morality, generalizable statements and all-ecompassing theories of a better society, but fundamentally all based on tired, worn-out 20th century notions of Communism and capitalism… blah, blah, blah.

The data rich argument about possible social policies by contrast, is armed with data found in the real world.  His data describes a totally new and different world, however narrowly defined by the data, than the 20th century “us versus them” dichotomy.  It therefore compels the reader to see things differently, to develop new policies that relate to the actuality of our situation. And that was the goal of both the verbal argument for better social policies as well as the data rich argument about possible social policies.  It is a hint of new forms of communication, in that, it transmits richer information.  This richer information is then available for knowledgeable others to use.

The verbal argument for creativity, oddly, provides a sense of order in the chaos.  The subjective skills that turn disparate information into a useable form.  Doing something with it.  It is not easy.  It requires advancing ones knowledge; courage to propose something that has never before been considered; and the subjective skills to stay focused on the goal, working it through whether it be long term or short term.  Courage and risk-taking… courage might be more apt, anyone can take a silly risk (wall street?), courage implies a bit of thought, of consideration involved; and a level of commitment to accept the consequences. From the context where the quotation about creativity was taken from, comes the additional value that this subjective skill enables one to “end a story” and thereby avoid getting lost in the futile, encyclopedic quest for ultimate knowledge.  Accomplishing a task.

background data… or foreground data… where is this leading me?

Using data such as dynamical mathematics, charts, diagrams, simulations of interactions, etc., to communicate has become increasingly common and is becomming necessary.  For the last 30 years, Western Liberal Arts academics have pursued the notion of “critical thinking” postulating that verbal arguments through better writing style, is the answer to communicating the complexities of our world.  This has been a failure.  It is a sign of the unwillingness of “old dogs to learn new tricks.”  Yes it is difficult to learn, and become experts at utilizing these new tools to communicate the complexities of our world.  But the alternative, is to become irrelevant…

Western notion of “Liberal Arts”?  This is dangerous territory here, because I don’t have any data, nonetheless here it goes:

Education as a model emerged as an elite activity: training leaders to lead, whether in China or Europe, aristocrats and emperors always had the “best education.”  America modeled its education system on this template, but attempted to “apply it to all people.”  Currently some of the most successful people have no college degree (Bill Gates, etc.), and the system is beginning to collapse under the weight of preconceived notions: summers off, 4 year college degree, post-graduate work, difficulty in finding post-collegiate jobs & the need for training before actively producing in the work-force, etc.  And of course this includes the idea that a Western Liberal Arts education, must be a part of any education.  I am certainly not smart enough to declare this is good or bad, simply taking note of the common assumption that some amount of “Western liberal arts” is a part of any good education.

Universities are becoming a self-indulgent exercise.  Western education has become a futile, encyclopedic quest for ultimate knowledge… for one’s self.  It has lost its sense of purpose, and so cannot find the end of the story.  We are no longer educating the elite to lead their respective “dominions.”  Education has become a process of socialization, whereby getting into the certain schools, ensures a specified social network.  Any knowledge gained is used in the socialization process.  However it is not used to butress the subjective skills that enable one “to adapt ideas to the use one wishes to put them to,” or said another way, accomplish something that one chooses.  Finding the end of the story…

The end of this story is that all of this points to a new found means of communication between people who are accomplishing things.  These new communication tools are technology rich, data intensive, diagrammatically able.  Not all people will communicate with these means. Some will prattle on with the old tools and old viewpoints.  But for the sake of any social realm, be it community, city, nation, region, or nomadic group, learning these new skills will be essential to creative accomplishments.

Two examples:

As an odd example of this new creative “language”, consider this story by Gary Kasporov, and what becomes of chess once the computer has beaten the best human chess player. The 20th century dichotomy “us versus them” extended into the realm of “Man versus computer.”  In 1997 when the computer beat the best human chess player, many thought the game was over.  But it was not, like all living systems there are always more possibilities open to us… if we can see them.  This is the big subjective, conceptual leap: one has to imagine them first.  Now with humans and computers working together, we humans, are learning even more!

And many many years ago, one of the originators of data rich forms of communication Leonardo da Vinci, utilizing many diagrams and numbers and contrivances in his notes,

…offers a significant example of the battle with language to capture something that evaded his powers of expression.

It is amazing to think that an entirely new form of communication is emerging.  A data rich form pioneered by Leonardo da Vinci hundreds of years ago, but rapidly becoming pervasive in the 21st century.  These are changing times… shall we choose to remain limited by language, by verbal (or written) arguments for and against?  The arguments for actions exist in a more more complex environment, and utilizing our data rich tools of expression will help human beings to communicate more complex ideas.

Three ideas:

1. a verbal argument for social policies: Tony Judt, “What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?” adapted from a lecture given at New York University on October 19, 2009.  New York Review of Books, Volume 56, Number 20 · December 17, 2009
2. a data rich argument about possible social policies: Samuel Bowles and Ugo Pagano, “Economic Integration, Cultural Standardization, and the Politics of Social Insurance” research paper from the Santa Fe Institute, 8 June 2005.
3. a verbal argument for creativity: Italo Calvino, “Six Memos for the Next Millennium” the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1985-86. The quotation is taken from the middle of the last lecture on Multiplicity, page 114.

+3:

1. example of the subjective gift that enables one to adapt ideas to use: Garry Kasparov, “The Chess Master and the Computer”New York Review of Books, Volume 57, Number 2 · February 11, 2010
2. example of the subjective gift that enables one to adapt ideas to use:: Italo Calvino, “Six Memos for the Next Millennium” the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1985-86. The quotation is taken from the end of the lecture on Exactitude, page 77.
3. example of life expectancy and health care spending: The hero on this chart is Cuba, and the looser is the US.

Oddly, we find that “US Health and Human Services Department found”:

1.) people with lower incomes and less education tended to die younger.

2.) Life expectancy also varied by ethnicity: whites 76.8 years, while African Americans lived an average of 70.2 years

3.) some countries achieve high life expectancy with low health spending because clean drinking water and preventive health care can be provided with little spending.

Clearly the US Health and Human Services Department is not looking in the right places if they are finding conclusions 1 & 2.  Cuba has lower income, African Americas and spends 1/18th as much money as the USA, and returns a longer average life spans.   And if the US Health and Human Services Department has found conclusion 3, then there is no need to spend more than $2000 per capita.  Health Care revisions should focus on lowering costs at least by 50% and raising life expectancy.

As for “universal care” that is an issue of social insurance… laid out in the paper by Samuel Bowles and Ugo Pagano.  Here is a chart showing the relevant factors:

Monet's image of the Seine as painted in 1868

Time and space.  Why is it so obvious in hindsight? Similar to his paintings of haystacks and water lilies, Monet spent a lot of time thinking about light and reflections and space. A lot of time, like his whole life. So, from the above viewpoint made when he was a young lad of 28, we get, after 30 years of looking and thinking about light and space, the following:

Monet's image of the Seine as painted in 1897

Simple, unadorned, rich and pleasing without sentimentality.  And in a sense, much deeper. Indescribable.

Chaco Canyon foundations from 860AD, New Mexico

John Henry Clippinger’s book “A Crowd of One.” has a bunch of interesting thoughts in it.  However they are not really wound into anything in particular… just left hanging at the end of the book.  Sometimes that’s how profound thoughts are: hugely overpowering to the author, such that they can’t really see the implications.

Anyhow, I just want to work on one idea: origin narratives, from his chapter titled The Power of Identity Narratives. Yes it is  January 1st, 2010.

When telling a story, defining a word, identifying a group, starting a company there are four integrated and required components of successful communication:

• a formal meaning, like dictionary definitions
• a telic meaning, an explanation of purpose
• a agentive meaning, an explanation of history
• a constitutive meaning, a definition context

Human beings find understanding through these 4 criteria and thereby create useable cultural constructs.  The definition of words, gives us the ability to communicate, which in turn gives us the ability to live in groups, which then enables us to create specialized technology, and so on.

These four criteria become the boundary conditions of any living component of civilization.  They function through accuracy: disproving the meaning or definition leads to significant change.  And thus more accuracy in the definition of an idea, or identity, has a longer life span.  This is true for words and cultures: an identity narrative that values untested beliefs  will not outlast a group of human beings who have richer technology based on causality and experimentation.  This includes current myths in American exceptionalism, representational democracy, etc.

Words are limited as micro components. Cultures are built up of smaller components such as words and ideas, expanding to include “origin narratives.” The most influential origin myths include “the return of an entity form the past to vindicate present hardships, leading to a brighter future.” Such narratives often include strong boundary definitions: dress, behavior, dialect which become rituals through repetition. This is an attempt to build durability and hence v. The only drawback is that these are exceedingly wrong when tested over time.

Questioning long term identity narratives is often considered blasphemy because the identity narrative is the glue, providing trust and social cohesion, that holds the group together in the short term. Which suggests a better conception of the inter-workings of scale in the dynamics of cultural systems is required. Words actually last longer than cultures, as such this implies our definitions and identity narratives of cultures are not as good as our definitions and meanings agreed upon for words. We don’t fight wars over words, but we do fight wars over identity narratives… may the strongest survive?

Some religious cultures appear to resist the unending questioning, open and mutable social order of global capitalism; while other secular cultures resist questioning (US Congress is systemically ineffectual at introducing significant change) the supremacy of the current myth of “free-market capitalism” (actually manipulated by various government and private sector entities), and a non-group level individualized social order. Which is a better narrative? Most likely there exist other more dynamically consistent, living models of cultural systems. Such a hypothetical system would have clear boundaries that reflect the amount of accuracy and change given in various periods of time: words to individuals, and small groups up to large group identities.

The metrics from which to measure the success and causality of cultural narratives is justice. Justice encapsulates all of the 4 criteria into a cooperative system. Thus clarity of causality in the interactions of people, enables new systems to emerge; because of the obvious justice. Such a new system has to be scaled as any complex adaptive system: clear causality of justice from neighborly interactions to global interactions.

In short, it is more important to focus on fair and just operations (eliminating loop-holes, privileged powers, etc. both actual justice & public relations justice) between reputable identities, than it is to work towards sanctions, formal controls, coercion and punishment.

aerial view: living nowhere today, but might be somewhere in the future

These thoughts have been prompted by technical analysis, social evaluations, political observations and philosophical insights of others:

• Growth, Innovation, Scaling, and the Pace of Life in Cities, by Luis Bettencourt, José Lobo, Dirk Helbing, Christian Kühnert, and Geoffrey West;
• The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett;
• Some African Countries are Just Not Viable, by Daniel Howden;
• Post-Wall: Neo Anti-Communism by Slavoj Žižek

In the shifting context from a 20 year reign of Western, US engineered socio-economic order, to something else in the upcoming 90 years, following are some thoughts about the places where human beings live. Historically a place where people live, has been called a city… but now what?

city?
From 3100 BC to 200 BC, “cities” generally reached 50,000 people with the largest places achieving 100,000. In 1500, the beginning of the modern era, the largest city in the world was Beijing with a population of 672,000, and the 9th largest city Guangzhou had 150,000 people.2 Populations in these ranges had been relatively unchanged for cities since 200BC. In a mere 500 years, populations of metropolises have increased by a factor of 50 with Tokyo having almost 35,000,000 people today.

On average, when the population of a place doubles, economic activity increases by 15%: growth equates to increasing economic potentials.3 Such growth occurs with increasing specialization of the citizen’s skills, yielding increasing knowledge potentials. A corollary is that governing methods also adapt in the effort to manage more groups of specialists, who have different skill sets and thus different viewpoints. Civility matters: the evolution of places has demonstrated that cooperation is a more successful evolutionary strategy.4 Governance of larger places, with more specialists, requires increasing civility. Indeed, despite claims regarding the inhumanity of industrialized warfare in the 20th century, the data unequivocally shows that there has been a decrease in the percentage of human deaths due to warfare with the evolution of civilization.5

Larger places enable more specializations, which depend on governance of more diverse specialists, resulting in higher levels of civility.

If larger places do not learn how to “get along” with more and more differences, revolutions occur which reduce the populations. Events like these reduce the differences between specialists and return lifestyles to older, simpler, or more accurately self-similar lifestyles.

The challenge of long-term governance (managing a place) whether it was 3100BC and 30,000 people, or today and 35,000,000 people, is to make places more populous, thus providing the conditions for increased economic and knowledge potentials. The methods for increasing populations are many:

• places which support larger family lifestyles,
• more efficient operation of infrastructure,
• longer lifespans,
• better healthcare
• valuing other people’s idiosyncrasies.

Governments no longer have a monopoly on places to live: migrations of people will happen more frequently and faster than in the past. Along with people choosing a place to live suited to their particular skill set, comes the competition between governments to build the most desirable places to live.

against the grain: a non-US model
Ninety percent of homes in Helsinki Finland are owned by the government. Additionally within multi-family buildings (vast majority of homes), the government leases homes to a mix of generational groups: elderly, singles, young families, etc.6 These features increase the chances that:
increasing civility will emerge from frequent interactions with people of different generations and different specializations
economically efficient infrastructure will emerge through better quality housing stock (urban infrastructure) since an entity is responsible for many generations
Combined into a globalized complex adaptive system, Helsinki is providing the conditions for increased economic and knowledge potentials.

human learning: skills, adaptability & civility
Living in a society, operating within or participating with a society, human beings negotiate situations. A situation may involve a task requiring skills, it may require utilizing a novel approach to a dilemma, and it often requires interacting with others having different viewpoints. Preparing people to perform well in unexpected situations is the challenge of education.

Education facilitates the phenomenon of economic and knowledge potentials tending to increase with growing population. At the level of a single human being “Education is about providing a motivational frame for the student to learn.”7 according to the physicist Alfred Hubler. The process of education is visible in three domains:

1. repetitive interactions enable feedback and skill development
2. travel expands one’s experiences, allowing for increased civility
3. awareness of the environment is the basis for knowledge acquisition

Matching expansive educational strategies to the scale of the situation, is related to the age of the individual or group, as well as the situations within which people operate.

Creativity is not a central focus, but emerges naturally, in skill development, knowledge acquisition and civil behaviors. It does not need to be built, or approached directly, creativity is an outcome of well performed interactions in situations between human beings, the physical world and the society.

trading places
Trading goods is a form of communication and a form of travel. From hunter gather societies through todays digital trading algorithms, trade has expanded the environment that existed at any one singular place. The physical place where trade occurred, cities and markets, was always an expansive environment: strange new people, events and things overlapped in a bazaar of suggestive provocation.

These interactions, these communications are the basis for enabling a society to expand beyond the confines of an existing size and tradition. Access to these “places,” physical places or virtual places in the case of communication tools such as trading desks, algorithms and high speed data networks, facilitates the exchange of suggestive provocation.

Similar to the rest of nature, different scales of access to these networks has emerged: power law relationships of places from neighborhoods, towns, cities and metropolises, mirror the scalar infrastructure of information and knowledge networks.

It is the access to any network that distinguishes one “place” from another. So while it may appear that the East Coast of the United States is one city from Boston all the way down to Washington DC, operationally, there are access points to communication and places that remain well defined.

vibrancy
Detroit and New Orleans are becoming less populated for different reasons. Both places are losing economic and knowledge potentials in the process. Luckily lost potentials are not the result of people in those places losing their smarts. Vibrancy is the rate that ideas, goods and services are traded. Vibrancy is independent of the scale of a physical place, and the scale of access to a virtual network. Decline is a sign of the overcapacity of a physical place relative to the transactions occurring, and the overcapacity of a network access point relative to the transactions occurring.

Radically reducing the scale of a place and consolidating access to networks increases the vibrancy of a place because transactions occur more frequently. Restoring the vibrancy is more important than restoring the buildings.

bizarre of suggestive provocation
Humans endeavour to track vibrant experiences, searching for patterns, to become better prepared when confronted with unexpected events in the future. The injection of unexpected phenomenon (vibrancy) challenges established situational models.

At small scales within a specialization, vibrancy enables people to reinvent details of whatever sub-discipline they are focused on.8 So regardless of the population of a place trading ideas, goods and services, a faster rate of trade supports a more vibrant dynamic and increases economic and knowledge potentials. The paradox of Detroit and New Orleans is that by consolidating infrastructure, they have the potential to re-emerge as inventors of specialized micro-technologies. Continuing to chase after global scale automobile manufacturing and water-based shipping industries are no longer possible relative to: their respective populations, rates of interactions and their situation within a larger global operating environment.

Emerging insights and innovations are necessary to harvest economic and knowledge potentials. Civility, in part, is about being in tune with one’s environment to catch the insight as it wisps past in a vibrant event space. Whether it is catching a naturally occurring phenomenon or recognizing a new solution to a human predicament, civility is participative.

organization of places for living
True enough our world is a rapidly changing global network, but people occupy physical space and require physical accoutrements to survive. Which things go where? Much like biology it is the frequency of occurrence that impacts the operation of society.
Currently the transportation of physical goods has highly stable characteristics: waterways, railroads and airports are very difficult to relocate, and have a huge impact on the possible configurations. These are followed by power stations and other larger scale geographic resources, etc. Even with wireless communication the physical world is still where we live.

Organization of places integrates physical networks with ethereal communication networks according to principles of scale. Increasing the efficiency so that human beings, or a group of human beings are positioned to harvest economic and knowledge potentials is the challenge.

comparativism
Knowledge acquisition by human beings is done through comparison: “keeping up with the Jones’.” In cell formation, comparison is done relative to one’s nearest neighbors. In the human nervous system, comparisons are done from a distance, at the speed of sound. How do we avoid comparing “apples and oranges”? In complex adaptive systems it is critical to identify the scale that one is interested in studying.

Comparisons are helpful to find patterns within the scale of an entity studied. Comparisons are also helpful to find patterns in the processes of phase change, or understanding the conditions between scales. However comparisons across scales tend to be less helpful, leading to gross errors of extrapolation, or projections of false patterns.

Behaviorally, humans compare what they see of people near them, and also between themselves and hypothetical people faraway: movie stars and foreigners. Accepting that there is a contribution of different practices, specialties and viewpoints is difficult: the scale of the patterns may be too large to identify, it may not be necessary to understand the contribution, and the context of a situation is complex. It was much easier to “recognize the value of a contribution” of others, when that value was determined, and or pre-determined, within a moral model of the universe.

What does “increasing civility” mean? Identifying a 10,000 year trend demonstrating that economic power is superseding military power will require more analysis. Yet it is possible that future revolutions are economically driven, with military force utilized less frequently as an archaic remnant. Two interesting paths the world may evolve towards:

• moral obligations are put out of business by sciences of complex phenomena
• economic power supersedes war powers

asia
Of the 34 largest cities in the world today, 19 are on, or near, Asia. This is why economic power is shifting from West (Europe and North America) to East: they have larger cities. Such a data based viewpoint would yield the following conclusion: the West is losing economic power because cities have stopped growing. This has occurred due to lower birth rates, less economic opportunity, and a cultural reluctance to live in megacities (over 20 million population). Some examples of reluctance is the cultural bias to preserve old means and methods of living, the “slow cities” movement, huge expenditures on preserving old infrastructure, limited spending on new massive infrastructure which would enable growth, the lack of cultural support for large families.

A corollary is that if we can’t solve the problems of living together in mega cities, we won’t grow. These are not architectural issues, but organizational issues. Today’s mega cities are on the leading edge of solving problems of living together without allowing crime to run rampant. Is there a limit to size growth, ie. if bigger cities always have more wealth, then we need bigger cities? It may turn out to be similar to heart rate vs. body size; at a certain point there are structural problems that can’t be overcome. The question is what might those structural limitations to growth be for cities?

In another 5000 years, these factors will continue to reduce the percentage of human beings killed in human against human warfare. Knowledge is acquired while one is aware of the expansiveness of a situation. Take Alfred Hubler’s idea and translate it to the level of society:

Organization of place is providing a situational frame for a group to advance their economic and knowledge potentials.

The full doc and all links can be downloaded here

1 Genesis of a music: an account of a creative work, its roots and its … by Harry Partch; see above image