We Make Cities

Introduction

“Self organisation and digital Darwinism are perfectly reasonable design strategies, and in many cases they just work. But let’s not forget the bigger picture, because we already know what Social Darwinism means and we already know what social darwinists have in mind.”

— Mario Carpo

This is how Mario Carpo ended his lecture at the Bartlett under the title Digital Darwinism. In his lecture, professor Carpo depicted the trend within design practices towards self organised systems, emergence and biology inspired processes that has been made possible by the use of computers. For Carpo, the use of such tools is valid but the danger of mixing the metaphor with reality is permanent, specially in fields of design with a high social political component such as urban planning.

ROUSSEAU, Henry, 1905, The hungry lion throws itself to the antelope. Oil on canvas. Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland.

The end of his conference was unexpected and many were left astonished so that the first question was an invitation to develop the link between Digital Darwinism and Social Darwinism:

“The jungle is a self organising system because, as you see, this animals are self organising. The lion is eating […] an antelope […] when the lion is done there is another animal waiting. That is the jungle and that’s why the jungle is a self organising system, which is probably why most of the time we do not live in there. We build cities as an alternative to the jungle.
We all know that some times when we study urban stuff or we design urban stuff, at some points it makes sense to study the city as a self organised system. Cities sometimes work in a self organised kind of way. It is a perfectly viable analytical and design strategy to study the city as a self organising system. But let’s not forget the bigger picture […] the city is not a self organising system. Cities do not grow like mushrooms in nature. We make cities. We organise cities, not nature. [...] if we overlay the metaphor with reality we know where we start but not where we end. Social Darwinism is a dangerous thing because humans do not eat one another and some people think they should.”

— Mario Carpo

We make cities is the argument for this essay. Self organisation might be seen as an abstract model, a design tool or even a post rationalisation. Looking at the city as a self organised system will always omit considerations of a social political nature, which should not be alien to architecture.

This essay will start looking at different theoretical approaches to self organisation, focusing on Michael Weinstock and Steven Johnson. Those ideas will be critiqued from the point of view of social sciences taking Carpo as a start point and opening the scope to other authors in order to set an argument based on the implications of explaining natural or social phenomenon with models of self organisation.

The second part of the essay will analyse a series of case studies in the light of the texts discussed. The first of them, the city of Singapore, will be looked at as an example of how urban policy shapes social structure within a city, contradicting claims of the city being a self organising system. Finally the essay will focus on projects of urban scale that have used self organisation as a design tool. They will be evaluated in terms of design but also in their approach to social issues and how self organisation affects them.

Self Organisation and the ‘Urban State of Exception’

Studies of self organisation usually start with its use as a model by biologists to explain certain behaviours observed in nature. So that Steven Johnson introduces emergence calling two examples from the natural world: The slime mould and how this colony of micro organisms learnt to find the right path through a labyrinth, and ant colonies, animals with a very simple nervous system but able to organise their communities with a certain degree of intelligence.

In both narratives about the research of biologists on emergent behaviours, Johnson stresses the unsuccessful attempts to explain them by the presence of a pacemaker. That historic determination on finding a pacemaker suggest that theories that explain such behaviours in terms of hierarchy were a by-product of a society also structured in strict hierarchies. Strands of thought arguing for a classless, less hierarchical and horizontal society are therefore at the origin of theories of self organisation.

There was no technical handicap that did not allow previous scientists to conclude that the Queen Ant was just a myth or that there was no pacemaker in slime mould. Those theories were the result of a current social and cultural context, reaffirming the idea that scientific facts are socially constructed and therefore evolve in parallel with society.

Today the science of emergence and self organisation is also used to explain the way global financial networks work. It might be true that globalisation has made financial networks more and more complex by enabling a global flow of capital. Such complexity cannot be fully understood, let alone controlled, by those at the forefront of the financial institutions. However, as Castells points out, switchers, those in charge of the links between networks are the “power holders” of today. That power might be sometimes blind because of the complexity of the networks, and their identity might be too diffuse to constitute a capitalist class sensu stricto, but they have power to interfere in a supposedly self organising system to modify its behaviour in their favour.

Interpreting Castells’ words as an absence of capitalists in the current network society and assuming financial markets are purely self organising contradicts the fact that the network society we live in is indeed more hierarchical than the late industrial society that preceded it, and the gaps of wealth and power, are getting wider and wider as global networks of capital allow for intense concentration of capital by enabling those with power to extract surplus at a global scale.

When Mario Carpo critiques self organisation he argues that the praise for the invisible hand of nature justifies the praise for the invisible hand of, for instance, financial markets. In regards of this essay the use of self organisation cannot be justified as a greater communion of man and nature for nature in our context is as much a cultural construct as financial markets are. However there is a further degree of perversion in assuming self organisation as the driver of financial markets. Assuming so inregards of nature, is just a model to explain certain phenomena, but assuming self organisation of financial networks means justifying the accumulation of capital of those better positioned within the network, with access to more switches, as a natural phenomenon or a scientific fact and therefore beyond the sphere of political action. If birth and kin were the sources of wealth and power of 18th century European elites, science and nature appear to be the ones of 21st century capitalists. But what does all this mean in terms of urbanism?

Focusing on self organisation applied to the built environment and the city, a critique must be made of Michael Weinstock’s approach. To introduce the topic of emergence in urban systems he starts talking about the emergence of civilisation thousands of years ago. He claims that agriculture, the major human development before industrial revolution, which allowed for the settlement of people in cities, was not an invention but an emergent system. According to him a unified Egyptian culture emerged from the flows of people and materials through the river Nile, and cities emerged more or less at the same time in five different areas of the world within certain ecological and climatic constrains. In those statements he is overlooking other factors that intervene in the shaping of cultures and societies which have nothing to do with self organisation but with power, wealth and struggle. These processes, take part in the evolution of culture and society and they cannot be described (only) in Darwinist terms of survival of the fittest. A society or a culture cannot be described only as a by-product of the adaptation of a certain population to a certain environment.

To imply that a certain social organisation emerges as an adaptation to a certain environment, in Darwinist terms, is the scientific determinism version of the old Dei Gratia, meaning that the King, no any other person, is the sovereign because God, someone alien to society, has decided so. By attributing social structures to a natural process of adaptation and evolution, we would be trying to place the authorship outside of culture. But let’s not forget that both science, as well as society, is a cultural construct that evolve with time. The structures of our society have authors, those with power to shape society. Self organising logics play a role, as it is easier to swim down the river than swimming back up, but the construction of society is a cultural process, although confronted with nature.

Johnson also talks about self organisation in the urban environment, taking 19th century Manchester as a case study. The northern English city is a typical example of unplanned urban expansion due to exponential demographic growth. It was not until 1853, when the city was already over one million inhabitants that the Government recognised Manchester as a city and gave it the political structures it needed to take decisions.

“What I have seen has disgusted and astonished me beyond all measure”

— Charles Dickens

As Johnson points out, many were the intellectuals of the time who visited Manchester and became fascinated by the rhythm of the city, the pace of its growth and the contrasts between the opulence of industrialists’ residential areas and the working class slums. Among all of them, Johnson pays special attention to Friedrich Engels, who visited the city several times in the 1840s. What he experienced in Manchester contributed to his book The Condition of the Working Class in England. In this book, the co-author of The Communist Manifesto acknowledges the self organising nature of the growth of the city for there was not such thing as a local authority in Manchester by that time. However, Engels points out that the city emerging from those self organising logics appears to favour the interests of the elites, keeping factories away from the main streets where their shiny shops are, and concentrating working class slums near the factories, but away from their areas of residence and leisure, just like ants keep their garbage and cemetery far from the core of the colony. Besides self organisation Engels finds Manchester elites “not so innocent altogether”.

WILDE, William, 1852, Manchester from Kersal Moor with rustic figures and goats. Watercolour. The Royal Collection Trust, Windsor, Berkshire, United Kingdom

Analysing Engels’ words Johnson recognises that the city was indeed modelled in the best interest of its elites but discards the idea of a deliberate design by them just because there is not official policy that accounts for it. In regards of this essay his position can be easily critiqued, as the lack of policy is also a way of driving deliberately the destiny of a city. In fact, when there are no policies, those with wealth and power are in a better position to shape the city according to their interests, putting in crisis the idea that working class slums naturally self seclude from the wealthy parts of the city like oils separates from water. In parallel to the previous example of financial markets, here self organisation seems to justify a city at the service of its elites as a natural process.

To further argument this point the work of Giorgio Agamben revising Carl Schimtt’s views on sovereignty should be looked at. For Carl Schmitt, sovereignty is the power to declare the State of Exception which is a scenario in which law does not apply anymore, in favour of “fact” and “necessity” which are subjective values. The suspension or absence of the law, as can be inferred from Agamben’s analysis, deepens the gap between those with power and those powerless. In the light of Agamben, we can say that the nature of the growth of Manchester is a by-product of an Urban State of Exception in which the institutions that should govern the city growth are absent, favouring those with power in “fact” in a “survival of the wealthiest” Darwinist scenario. Without denying self organising features in those processes, stress has to be put on the class struggle that lies behind the shaping of a city like Manchester at the peak of the industrial revolution.

STEINMETZ, Georges, 2009, [Aerial fotograph of Beni Isguen, Ghardaia, Algeria] [online]

Bibliography:

AGAMBEN, Giorgio, 2005, State of Exception. Translated from Italian by K. Attell. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

CARPO, Mario, 2013, Digital Darwinism, The Bartlett International Lecture Series, London. [video online] Available at: <http://vimeo.com/58449537> [24 February 2013]

CASTELLS, Manuel, 1996, “Conclussion: The Netwrok Society” in The Rise of the Netwrok Society. Oxford. pp. 500-509.

ENGELS, Friedrich, 1845, The Condition of the Working Class in England. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

JOHNSON, Steven, 2001, Emergence: the connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software. London: Penguin.

LATOUR, Bruno, 1986, Laboratory life: The construction of scientific facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

WEINSTOCK, Michael; “City Forms” in 2010 The Architecture of Emergence. London: John Wiley & Sons.