Anders response

Duncan Watts starts his article with a series of questions. I really like this manner of writing as it capture my attention straight away. I want to know the answer of these questions. All his questions are the same version of one question; “How does individual behaviour aggregate to collective behaviour?” Watts suggests that sometimes the bigger mass is easier to understand than the complicated individual itself, as long as you ignore the more complicated individual details. Knowing the behaviour of the individuals does not necessary help us understanding the way of the group. At the levels of groups, systems and populations a new phenomena can emerge. Individuals in a large system can generate greater complexity than the individuals themselves.

Jane Jacobs uses the city as the principle of emergence. “Cities happen to be problems in organized complexity” Jacobs writes (p433). She goes on and refers to Dr Weaver who suggests that cities consist of a number of situations all varying simultaneously and in subtly interconnected ways. Jane Jacobs implies this reasoning to city planning and recognizes the problem of just looking at a few factors individual instead of looking at the city and reasoning from particulars to the general (rather than reverse).

Gould and Lewontin writes in their critique of the adaptationist programme that organisms must be analysed as integrated wholes. They further points out that in an integrated whole the “constraints themselves (between individuals) become more interesting and more important in delimiting pathways of change than the selective force that may mediate change when it occurs”.

So, in trying to end my response in the manner Watts starts his article, with a question: Is an emergent system something that is created with a number of individual parts that together form a more complicated whole? Or is it just a mass of whatever, together in a system?

Emergence

Both Jacobs and Gould critique the existing models of thinking about progress in their respective fields. Interestingly the two authors characterize these existing models of thought as inhabiting two opposite poles of the philosophical spectrum. Each posits a completely different existing paradigm for how man considers his relationship to nature. For Jacobs the existing model of thought about how cities progress is flawed because man has completely detached himself from nature. She writes on pg. 443, “Underlying the jejunue belief in ‘the dark and foreboding’ irrationality of chaos of cities, lies a long established misconception about the relationship of cities - and indeed of men - with the rest of nature.” Gould critiques the “adaptationist programme” of biology by claiming that it relies on a Panglossian view of nature. Dr. Pangloss, a character that Voltaire created for the explicit purpose of ridiculing his contemporary philosophical competition (Leibnitz), suffers from the misconception that “Things cannot be other than they are … Everything is made for the best purpose.” To sum up the differences between the two critiques in a far too simple manner we could say that Jacobs critiques a worldview that is overwhelming complex and irrational while Gouuld critiques a worldview that is overly totalizing and simplistic. Modern analogues to these critiqued paradigms could be nihilism and intelligent design perhaps.

sha_week6

The idea of emergence [and cities] has always fascinated me, so it was interesting to read Jane Jacobs’ article and have this idea slowly emerge as if we were afraid to ever think about cities in such a way. Even the title refuses normal capitalization. Much of the theory is introduced by narrating and parsing the ideas of Dr. Weaver. The extensive italics that appear show the focus [and in some sense, excitement] of the author on this idea of complex systems, where the Jacobs has deemed it necessary to place even more emphasis — kind, disorganized complexity, organized complexity, organic whole, subtly interconnected ways, etc…It is an odd shift when Jacobs, having lead the reader through Dr. Weaver’s impressive theories and impressing upon the reader how impressive these ideas of organized complexity are, she begins to lead this reader into critiquing current planning practices and the disrespect of cities in general. This notion of disrespect was very interesting, because of the tie in she uses later with nature and sentimentality. Jacobs says there “are dangers in sentimentalizing nature. Most sentimental ideas imply, at bottom, a deep if unacknowledged disrespect…” It reminded me somewhat of taking photographs, something I struggle with in my trips to China. By taking a photograph, you acknowledge to some degree the event or scene’s ability to become an image — the scene dies a little when you agree to that assumption. What Jacobs proposes, then, is a refusal to sentimentalize nature and deny real nature from intruding upon cities; Jacobs suggests that the vital city [along with its own biological descriptions] is capable of being active, not diseased, because of their complexity. This then raises an interesting challenge to planners, and is perhaps why planners have always seen cities as either “disorganized complexity” or “irrational.” Jacobs critiques planners and designers but does not suggest ways to create lively, diverse cities — vital cities. It is implied that vital cities exist, but how can we learn from them? Are planners an obsolete idea?

EMERGENCE

Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities categorizes the progression of problem solving into three distinct stages: problems of simplicity - direct causal relationships between two (or few) variables, problems of disorganized complexity - statistical deductions from a great number of variables operating as a group, and problems of organized complexity - as Dr. Weaver puts it: "Much more important than the mere number of variables is the fact that these variables are all interrelated...[these problems] show the essential feature of organization. Our understanding of each type of problem has been a linear chronology, where realization that the nature of the problem is more complex than previously perceived enables us to approach it from a more accurate standpoint. The article goes on to describe life sciences' realizations about problems of organized complexity that led to countless advances in its field - which neatly segues into the stagnancy of city planning due to designers' inability to recognize the problems of the city as ones of organized complexity.

Although emergence is not mentioned at all in the article, the nature of problems of organized complexity points towards the idea of emergence, which deals with how variables interrelate to form a dissimilar collective. Gould & Lewontin's article uses the refutation of Panglossian paradigm to hint at a system of local optimizations that rely on interdependence of non-critical variables, that is more akin to the behavior of emergence. However, I feel as if emergence's ties of biology exists only because we began to understand biological systems in terms of emergent behavior first, and that intrinsic ties to biological systems might be a misconception. When in fact emergence is an effective system to understand the studies of, as Duncan Watts says: "ecology, epidemiology, to sociology and economics, each of which comes with its own rules and principles that are not reducible to a mere knowledge of psychology and biology." Emergence may well be the best current system for us to understand these fields of study, yet it is entirely possible that the progress of problem solving will reveal emergence's shortcomings.

Emerging Networks

Emerging Networks
The notion of emergence in architecture is analyzed by Jane Jacobs in her “death and life of great American cities” by studying the relationship of scientific thought and cities. This idea of emergence can be carried further to architecture by understanding the evolution of scientific thought and the emergence of post modernism from modernism. The emergence in modernist design was the same transition as from problems of simplicity to organized complexity. This is important because the state of architecture today is an emergence from the simple analysis of modernism to the organized complexity of post modernism today.
This would all make perfect sense to Duncan Watts as he explains in his book “Six Degrees” that every science and more generally any method can be explained in terms of networks. Therefore this tandem relationship between the progression of scientific thought and architecture is really a display of the interdependency of these two networks. Each network not only becoming more complex but also the understanding of them as being a complex organization. While in two different fields, the modernist designers were gathering new ideas from science through the new technological revolution that was changing our world. The science at the turn of the century was based on problems of simplicity. Therefore the formalist of the modern movement were concerned with simple resultant answers.
These simple answers could only be based on simple questions made up of the relationship of rudimentary geometries. However cities, as explained by Jacobs, are “problems in organized complexity” and “present situations in which a half-dozen or even several dozen quantities are all varying simultaneously and in subtly interconnected ways.” Now while she is describing cities, they are made up of architecture and can be judged as a different scaled network, but a network that works on the same governing principles. So just as scientific thought was forced to recognize the multiple complex networks to properly describe its disciplines, the modernist were forced to recognize the failure of the simplistic responses to the complex networks of design.

Emergence
Bin Wang
In the two articles , the authors seem to use natural phenomena as examples or analogies to imply the growth of the cities and means of city planning. I appreciate some points while can not agree some others.

In Jacobs’s writing, she mentioned “the life sciences and cities happen to pose the same kinds of problems does not mean they are the same problems.” However her point that “city planning cannot possibly progress” is compared to the progress of life sciences, which is a different problem. Even city planning cannot progress, it is not because “it lacks the first requisite for a body of practical and progressing thought” but because city planning have to solve more and more problems on the existing cities, which is a big constraint. On contrast, in life sciences, the existing knowledge and materials will help for the next step. What’s more, city planning is a kind of design but not discovery. Just like we cannot say Picasso’s paintings are better then De Vinci’s(that may another problem), but we also cannot say art has no progress at all in the last 500 years. Actually, city planning has progress , at least it seems to me. We have multiple transportation, high rise residents, global networks, which was only in human’s imagination. Of course we have unsuccessful city planning as well, just like those failure in life science experiments.

Analogy sometimes misleads the understanding. As reading the articles I have the sense that the authors are trying to let me recognize cities as natural phenomena, on some extend. To me city planning has a huge difference with the natural phenomena because cities are not nature. The progress of cities are not natural selections. Cities are growing by human’s intention, successful or not. In most cases I feel we are conflicting with natural selections. For example, most city plannings try to preserve the old city fabric which may not match the new life at all. The reason we do it may related to the deepest essence of the meaning of the cities. When we tear the old building down, we kind of feel some human history has been destroyed. The life of human being as a whole is tightly tied with the context and growth of the cities. Cities are the bodies we live in.

In conclusion, I am not very care about the relation between cities and natural phenomena. I don’t think the “emergence” of city is similar with that of nature, science, whatever. City is itself. We maybe cannot tell why blood is red, why elephant is bigger than ants. But we can definite tell what is Baroque , what is modernism; what is Chinese and what is European. And we probably will know what the city will be like in the future because we will design it.

Liwen's post on Emergence

Emergence

Liwen Zhang

The word emergence has strong biological ties that link very successfully to the ways in which we view our cities. Upon looking up the word on dictionary.com, I realize the connotations that emergence has with evolution. In Gould and Lewontin’s critique of adaptationist theories, they very interestingly bring up the issue of architectural constraints that tend to be ignored in discourse upon topics in biology. Gould and Lewontin state that academics tend to rely exclusively on Darwin’s theory of adaptation and evolution alone. This is problematic, firstly because it is a big misinterpretation of what Darwin himself had intended and secondly such negligence could potentially rule out a whole array of new possibilities that could only be unraveled by taking on constraints, such as history and architecture, into account.

Gould and Lewontin’s piece transitions purposefully into Jane Jacob’s reading of the city. Jacobs views the city as a problem of organized complexity, one upon which has to be analyzed as “interrelated into an organice whole” (Jacobs, 433). Jacobs puts into question the current paradigms of urban planning, where the mapping out of statistical master plans leads to a general top down approach to planning. Her descriptions of the way planners think about the cities, the “remote telescopic view”, which de Certeau later proclaims as the “panorama city”, effectively makes the complexities of the cities immediately readable and reduced to mere statistics.

Jacobs’ sophisticated reading and analysis of the city is powerful as she manages to find authority through an anti-expert persona, one upon which she privileges “ordinary people in cities” to have advantage over the experts, in this case, the planners. Perhaps what is most peculiar about this chapter in her book is how she ends it- on an environmentally optimistic note, one upon which she concludes that “big cities and countrysides can get along well together” (Jacobs, 447). Perhaps seeing that a biological theme is prevalent throughout the whole article, Jacobs found the need to tie the piece together with reference to nature. Upon finishing the article, I cannot help but feel that it is very environmentally deterministic. According to Jacobs, the “lively, diverse [and] intense” environments of cities are what will be the solution, per say, to the proposed “problem” as opposed to a “dull, inert” city (Jacobs, 338). This is problematic because Jacobs’ fails to take into account that upon shaping the environment, particular social classes are privileged over others, thus overlooking the socioeconomic conflicts that are inherent within such a “problem”. Thus it may not be a surprise then, when critics conclude that Jacobs’ writings, despite being influential, eventually led to conservative planning.

Emergence

In both the Gould and Jacobs writings, the idea of emergence is not explicitly defined as the subject of the article, rather, natural phenomena serve as case studies for the principles of emergence. In both these articles (neither of which used the word emergence) and the multiple case studies they present, the key to understanding change as a phenomenon is to see it is a complex result of many interrelated variables rather than a simple problem—the essential definition of the word emergence. The Gould article argues this point with multiple examples ranging from the dome of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice to the development of cannibalism. In each situation, whenever a simple (or singular) adaptive strategy is developed, the authors cite the complex myriad of extraneous factors that also contributed to this condition. This is best summed up in the statement, “organisms are integrated entities, not collections of discreet objects.”

Jane Jacobs, in her seminal book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, expands the same essential argument as Gould, using, as the chapter’s title “The kind of problem a city is” suggests, the city as an example. Clichés (“slippery as an eel” on page 433) and commonsensical language (“the processes that occur in cities are not arcane…they can be understood by almost anybody” on page 441) are used to draw the reader into a didactic discussion of why cities are misunderstood. Tracing the history of problem solving (as outlined by “Dr. Weaver,” who stands in as surrogate teacher), problems were first understood and analyzed “as problems of simplicity,” or problems where several variables can be analyzed to determine behaviors. I thought this argument was particularly valid for much of modern architecture’s city planning, where I can just imagine practical men such as Ebenezer Howard comparing quantity of housing versus number of jobs as the key principle in this Garden City. Jacobs readily dismisses this (correctly) as naive and instead postures that cities are “complex, organized problems.” This, to me, was Jacobs inadvertently describing emergent systems. Furthermore, she uses the word “behavior” (she even uses italics) as crucial in understanding “complex, organized problems,” or emergence. So phenomena such as vibrant (or dead) streets “emerge” from a complex network of organized behaviors. Although Jacobs, as I have already noted, states the problem can be understood “by almost anyone,” the seemingly infinite number of influences makes understanding the city in this way daunting—a sentiment Jacobs practically tackles with a three-point plan.

Having taken a studio taught by an architect whose practice is named “emergent,” I was particularly intrigued that these two readings gave me a better idea of emergent systems than I got all semester in studio, despite the fact neither of them used the word. Which raises a larger question: how can emergent systems be a design mechanism rather than a design result? The typical design of a large structure (e.g. the Seattle Public Library as outlined by the Metropolis article, “we built this”) involved hundreds of people from different professions with different motivations. In this sense, the resultant design could be characterized as emergent. However, the emergent aspect arises in the process of design development through construction, not in schematic design, where one architect (i.e. Rem Koolhaas) is able to assert authorship. Seemingly, emergence, by its definition, cannot have a singular author and architects who profess this as their design strategy fail to understand the principle in the way Gould and Jacobs describe it.