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2.2.2 Life, entropy and resilience in the city Gonzalo Delacรกmara
Life, entropy and resilience in the city: The City
By C.P. Cavafy, translated by E. Keeley and P. Sherrard You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore, find another city better than this one. Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong and my heart lies buried like something dead. How long can I let my mind moulder in this place? Wherever I turn, wherever I look, I see the black ruins of my life, here, where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.” You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore. This city will always pursue you. You’ll walk the same streets, grow old in the same neighbourhoods, turn grey in these same houses. You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere: there’s no ship for you, there’s no road. Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.
Life
Have you ever thought about embryo development? Amazingly, a single fertilised egg can develop into an entire body, an extremely sophisticated organism, with a very wide array of cell types, each in the right place, playing its role, working together in a co-ordinated way (Hopwood, 2000). At the onset, stem cells in the embryo are identical units that can differentiate into specialised ones and can divide (through mitosis) to produce more stem cells. Embryo development is thus a magnificent process of cell specialization (differentiation). Once the organism is an adult one, stem cells still act as a repair system, replenishing tissues. The process by which a cell gradually changes from being completely unspecialised to having a specific function is not that different to how urban development unfolds. In cities, also genes (i.e. basic planning units) are switched on and off, which in turn changes the proteins (urban functional units) that are present and active in each urban cell or tissue. After all, genes contain all the information needed to make proteins. 2
There is something in this prodigious evolution, though, that might be disrupting – at the end of the differentiation process, cells that can no longer divide or change any further (specialised cells) do have a role in the body… but one that cannot change. Not all cells are deemed to reach this end point, though. Some retain the ability to differentiate so that they can replace other cells, if needed. Cancer, for instance, as it is well known, will develop when some of those cells are deprogrammed. Hence, the analogy does not only apply to urban development but also to retrofitting and urban decay.
Entropy
No matter how compelling the above-mentioned process might be, the great thing (a distinctive feature) about urban development is that it is also contingent on many different variables, among which human behaviour – sometimes predictable, many times of a random nature – is not a minor one. In other words, there is no determinism, rather just a bit of entropy. Cities, the way they grow, their development, are the result of rational decisions and incentives. These decisions, though, may more often than not lead to unsustainable outcomes. Daniel Kahneman (2011), a Nobel Memorial Prize Laureate in Economic Sciences (2002), presents our thinking process as consisting of two systems: thinking fast (unconscious, intuitive, almost effortless), and thinking slow (conscious, through deductive reasoning, and with significant effort). We tend to believe the latter prevails over the former but we might be wrong. We often associate intuition with irrationality but that link is fallacious. On the other hand, the origin of much that we do wrong (as individuals or as an entire society), is also at the roots of what we do right. Unlike common wisdom, many of the decisions above are not even determined within the city itself but elsewhere. Religious segregation in Beirut (Lebanon) and its impact on the built environment can be explained by the whole geopolitical conflict in the Middle East; the incipient renaissance of Medellin (Colombia) is actually determined by the dislocation of drug traffic away from Colombia and towards Mexico and Central America as much as by urban planning and social inclusion policies; urban decay in Detroit (USA) can be elucidated on macroeconomic grounds – a whole economic model coming to an end… The current world economic and financial crisis (2007-) has provided us with a unique opportunity to understand how the wider economic context can actually yield significant impacts at an urban scale. The U.S. author Don Delillo coined an eloquent expression in his novel White Noise that applies to the collective fiction that leads to a financial crisis: ‘spiritual surrender’. Cover - Turbine Hall, Tate Modern (London, UK), 2007 - Gonzalo Delacámara
“Being here [he said] is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.” Of course, when leaving that “shared hallucination”, as Bloom (2000) would call it, or what Robert J. Shiller (2015) fortunately named “irrational exuberance”, it is hard to believe again. It would be virtually impossible to explain any housing boom with no reference to this wider context.
Resilience
In Mongolia, many herders already seem to be giving up their pastoral and nomadic practices, which mainly explains the fast-growing periphery in Ulaanbaatar capital city, where every year 30,000-40,000 new rural-to-urban migrants pitch their traditional tents (‘ger’). This can be mainly explained by the lack of water for their rural livelihoods. This water shortage, in turn, is the unintended outcome of intensive mining activities, driven by high international commodity prices. What is at stake, in cases like that, is not the urban sprawl of a city; rather, the economic model of a country, its ability to enhance welfare for a wide majority, food security, the ability to adapt to climate change… It is very tempting to seduce ourselves that the answer to architectural and urban challenges lies with buildings or master plans. Let’s think of a self-sufficient building, though. Since it is clear that one cannot separate the buildings out from the infrastructure of cities and the mobility of transit, that self-sufficient building might be part of the answer but not the answer in itself. The economic underpinnings of sustainable urban development and the performance of cities still remain poorly understood. A central question is still how the mix of social agents in a city affects the nature of its functions and services at one point in time (and in dynamic terms) in the face of changes in the wider context. This question though is far from being unexplored: it is well known that the essential functions of a city are provided at any point in time by a relatively small number of social and economic agents; further agents primarily replicate these essential urban functions. There are different ways in which functional diversity might be important for welfare enhancement in the cities. The diversity of agents might enhance the city’s function because different social and economic agents perform slightly different functions (i.e. have different ‘niches’). In a different way, it might be neutral (when not negative) in that there may be more urban agents than functions, thereby leading to potential redundancy. There is increasing Figure 1 - Manhattan (New York City, NY, USA), 2011 - Gonzalo Delacámara 4
evidence, though, that the diversity of functional units in a city might enhance the urban system function because those components that appear redundant at one point in time may well become critical in the event of either endogenous or exogenous changes. In other words, maintaining a diversity of functional types is thought to confer resilience on cities. Redundancy would therefore play an insurance role for urban development and city function, enabling the maintenance of critical functions under stressful conditions. Maintaining high levels of functional diversity in the city thus enhances the ability to cope with change induced by multiple pressures or with unpredictable or non-directional environmental change – precluding adaptive responses, at a micro-evolutionary or trans-generational time scale, and stability to cities. Resilience of the built and natural urban environment is closely connected, as part of a two-way loop, to socioeconomic resilience. This can only be actually ascertained though as part of innovative, complex, integrative, interdisciplinary frameworks.
The link between the functional diversity within cities and the wider context for urban development would clearly benefit from the concept of ‘mutualism’, a pervasive notion in biology and even in political economy but hardly ever used in practice to reconcile different approaches to sustainable urban development and welfare enhancement. The resilience of urban systems is a necessary condition for socioeconomic resilience and this, in turn, is a condition for the resilience of cities as a whole.
What makes life (in a city) a good one?
Scanlon argued, “the [concept of] quality of life suffers from an embarrassing richness of possibilities. [...] What kinds of circumstances provide good conditions under which to live? What makes a life a good one for the person who lives it? What makes a life a valuable one?” (Scanlon, 1993, p. 185). 6
Quite often, individual wellbeing and social welfare are meant to be the outcome of material wealth and improved consumption opportunities. On the contrary, many people would rather argue that prosperity has nothing to do with economic growth. Nevertheless, it is not necessarily a question of redefining prosperity on the basis of the absence of growth; it is also a matter of redefining growth itself, since it has proved to be a driver for prosperity in many contexts. To put it this way, the question is not so much whether or not to grow, but how it comes about. Growth based on inequality or environmental degradation, for instance, is notably unsustainable. Yet, in many places and for many people, growth has been extraordinarily successful in ensuring prosperity and opportunity for a wide majority. Growth, prosperity, happiness are after all (perceived as) goods, under conventional wisdom. The analogy Figure 2 - Manhattan (New York City, NY, USA), 2011 - Gonzalo Delacรกmara
between growth and happiness is not just because one immediately leads to the other, which is not the case, but rather because the quest for growth can sometimes prevent growth from being a source of prosperity in such a way as the search for happiness is very often a source of unhappiness. Just like most economic analyses lack a proper spatial research, even within the scope of spatial economics or economic geography, urban and architectural design tends to overlook microeconomic and macroeconomic variables. There are some stylized facts that may be worth having in mind. Economic conditions – income, employment (or at least employability), price stability, and equity – are important determinants of happiness. Besides, non-material aspects – family, friendship, and other social ties – also matter greatly. It has also been observed that people tend to adjust to their basic level of happiness, depending on their resilience, after negative (and also positive) life events, just as stem cells can restore other cells under adequate circumstances. Yet, many of these factors are not necessarily linked to the way cities are designed or evolve. Or are they? Of all our identities, probably no one is so powerful as the urban one. Our preferences unveil in every decision we make at an individual or a collective level about our cities. In fact, the act of not choosing is actually a choice per se. In all those cities with wide areas of urban decay and derelict infrastructure, the cost of inaction is appalling. That necrotic urban tissue is hardly ever the outcome of a bad decision but rather the evidence of more powerful trends impacting on the city. An off-putting finding is that failed urban design is not necessarily the result of the absence of planning – it is mostly the result of capitulation, slackness, and apathy, or just the outcome of incentives to behave like that. Ascertaining individual and collective preferences, understanding human behaviour, are unavoidable elements of urban design. That is probably the only way to build up urban resilience in times of massive migrations, sluggish growth, fiscal consolidation, climate changes, increased risk and uncertainty, institutional lock-in, high transaction costs, emergence of populism, skewed distribution of income and wealth, financial issues gobbling up social ones, self-indulgence, unsustainable use of natural capital, “intellectual bulimia” (as Umberto Eco would put it), unilateralism...
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References
1.Bloom, Howard (2000). Global brain: The evolution of mass mind from the big bang to the 21st century. Vol. 13. New York: Wiley. 2.Hopwood, Nick (2000). “Producing development: The anatomy of human embryos and the norms of Wilhelm His.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 74.1 (2000): 29-79. 3.Kahneman, Daniel (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Macmillan. 4.Keeley, Edmund, Philip Sherrard, and George Savidis. (1975). CP Cavafy: Collected Poems, Princeton University Press. 5.Scanlon, T. (1993). Value, desire and quality of life, In: Nussbaum, M.C. and Sen, A. (Eds.), 1993. The Quality of Life, Oxford University Press. 6.Shiller, Robert J. (2015) Irrational exuberance. Princeton University Press.
Figure 3 - Canal Street, Lower Manhattan (New York City, NY, USA), 2011, Gonzalo Delacámara – A cyclist trying to conquer space in a city that has not been designed for cyclists is like a gene mutation in the urban system.
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