VII. Our Earthuman Ascent: A Major Evolutionary Transition in Individuality

3. Planetary Physiosphere: Anatomics, Economics, Urbanomics

Historians, architects, and writers have often noted that our composite human societies, especially in urban settings, might be seen in their material circulations, skeletal infrastructure, and cognitive cultures to take on a likeness of the anatomy, metabolism and nervous system of a developing organism. As the title cites, into the 21st century settlements from villages to cities have equally been described dynamic exemplars of nature’s complex, fractal, cellular, network self-organization. A corollary is then their intentional recreation in an organic way (car arteries, speed limits as blood pressure), but seems inhibited by older mechanistic models. So once more in our homo to anthropo sapiens emergent transition, our abidances are vibrant manifestations of life and mind writ larger. This section also reports a shift in finance and commerce from equilibrium models as another dynamic complexity revision, aka econophysics.

2020: While cities swell and suburbs sprawl, a commonwealth of analytic and holistic studies have found our habitations from villages to urban centers can well represent one more epitome of nature’s organic, self-organized fractal network complexities. Together with cellular automata methods, even this intense human phase can gain a broader and deeper coherence by way of reliable formations and activities. The take home promise would be an ability to intentionally avail their presence and guidance from sustainable person to planet scales.

Batty, Michael. Inventing Future Cities. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018.
Carbone, Anna, et al. Journal of Physics: Complexity. June, 2022.
Cherednik, Ivan. Modeling the Waves of COVID 19. Acta Biotheoretica. December 2021.
Cogdell, Christina. Toward a Living Architecture?: Complexism and Biology in Generative Design. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
D’Acci, Luce, ed. The Mathematics of Urban Morphology. Springer: Birkhauser, 2019.
Domingues, Guilherme, et al. City Motifs as Revealed by Similarity between Hierarchical Features. arXiv:2204.09104.
Gelfand, Michele. The Relationship Between Cultural Tightness - Looseness and COVID-19 Cases and Deaths.. Lancet Planetary Health. January, 2021.
Gonzalrz, Leonardo, et al. Modeling an Urban Highway: A Statistical Physics Point of View. arXiv:2208.13620.

Lobo, Jose, et al. Urban Science: Integrated Theory from the First Cities to Sustainable Metropolises. SSRN Electronic Journal. January, 2020.
Portugali, Juval, ed. Handbook on Cities and Complexity. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2022.
Pumain, Denise and Juste Raimbault. Perspectives on Urban Theories. arXiv:1911.02854.
Schlapfer, Markus, et al. The Hidden Universality of Movement in Cities. arXiv:2002.06070.
Tirico, Michele, et al. Morphogenesis of Street Networks: A Reaction-Diffusion System for Self-Organized Cities. arXiv:2111.03544.
Yang, Vicky Chuqiao, et al. Scaling and the Universality of Function Diversity across Human Organizations. arXiv:2208.06487.

2023:

Harvard Human Immunomics Initiative. Google key words. In the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic, this is an April 2020 Harvard School of Public Health project which seeks to foster global collaborations to gather, coordinate, study, test and advance the broad endeavor of effective vaccines. Frontier applications of AI and deep learning methods are a key feature. It is alluded that the result might ultimately act as a planetary immune system with better responses. For a companion effort, see Here’s How to Use Tech to Turn COVID-19 Tragedy into a Global Immune System (Google) on the Atlantic Council website. For complex system insights see Quantitative Immunology for Physicists by Gregoire Altan-Bonnet, et al in Physics Reports (Vol. 849, 2020, search). This site has also broached a Global Geonome component in the Cultural Code section

International Society of Biourbanism. www.biourbanism.org. A lively 2012 endeavor based in Rome and composed of European, American, Israeli, members, with contributions from Russia, Thailand, Mexico and more. An online Journal of Biourbanism has worthy papers such as “Biophilia and Gaia” by Giuseppe Barbiero, “Soft Infrastructures for a Neo-Metabolism” Thomas MIcal, and “Towards Sustainability: Self-Organizing Communities” by Juan Tellez.

MISSION: The International Society of Biourbanism is a not-for-profit scientific network for high-quality research, theory making, education, and practice in Urbanism and Architecture. It supports research, publishing and education by providing a shared area for the exchange and dissemination of knowledge about biourbanism as a new epistemological approach to cities and biophilic design. It supports research, publishing and education by providing a shared area for the exchange and dissemination of knowledge about biourbanism as new scientific way to study cities and in support Biophilic Design.

AIMS: To create the theoretical basis for a new human-oriented built environment according to the most exciting scientific developments, such as fractals, complexity theory, evolutionary biology, morphogenesis, biophilia, biomimicry, artificial intelligence and peer to peer urbanism.

DEFINITION: Biourbanism focuses on the urban organism, considering it as a hypercomplex system, according to its internal and external dynamics and their mutual interactions. The urban body is composed of several interconnected layers of dynamic structure, all influencing each other in a non-linear manner. This interaction results in emergent properties, which are not predictable except through a dynamical analysis of the connected whole. This approach therefore links Biourbanism to the Life Sciences, and to Integrated Systems Sciences like Statistical Mechanics, Thermodynamics, Operations Research, and Ecology in an essential manner.

International Workshop on Coping with Crises in Complex Socio-Economic Systems. http://videolectures.net/ccss09_zurich. Held June 8-12, 2009, chaired by Dirk Helbing, a posting of talks by 26 leading theorists, all men, such as Guido Caldarelli, Didier Sornette, Frank Schweitzer, Luciano Pietronero and Shlomo Havlin, which offer many nonlinear insights into underlying, endemic forces at work in the recent global economic convulsions. The quote is from Eugene Stanley’s presentation "Economic Fluctuations and Statistical Physics."

Two unifying principles that underlie much of the finance analysis we will present are scale invariance and universality. Scale invariance is a property not about algebraic equations but rather about functional equations, which have as their solutions not numbers but rather functional forms - power laws. The key idea of universality is that the identical set of “scaling laws” hold across diverse markets, and over diverse time periods.

Adjali, Iqbal and Stephen Appleby. The Multifractal Structure of Human Population Distribution. Tate, Nicholas and Peter Atkinson, eds. Modelling Scale in Geographical Information Science. Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2001. Self-similar, scale-invariant patterns underlie demographic population patterns.

Aguilera, Miguel, et al. Quantifying Political Self-Organization in Social Media: Fractal Patterns in the Spanish 15M Movement on Twitter. Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Artificial Life. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013. In a forthcoming volume slated for MIT Press, University of Zaragoza, and University of the Basque Country, Spain, information specialists, including Xabier Barandiaran, find such public groupings of every kind to persistently, naturally exhibit these dynamic network self-similarities. In accord with many other studies, the evident implication would be that there must be some independent, mathematical implicate source in generative effect.

The objective of this work is to better analyse and understand social self-organization in the context of social media and political activism. More specifically, we centre our analysis in the presence of fractal scaling in the form of 1=f noise in different Twitter communication networks related to the Spanish 15M movement. We show how quantitative indexes of brown, white and pink noise correlate with qualitatively different forms of social coordination of protests: rigidly organized protests (brown noise), reactive-spontaneous protests (white noise) and complex genuinely self-organized protests (pink noise). In addition, pink noise processes present correlations that reach much further in time, maintaining a dynamical coherence that last several days, and also show a balance between mean distance and clustering coefficient within the interaction network. (Abstract)

Unlike previous studies of network analysis of the 15M movement and the similar uprisings, the focus of this paper is on characterizing more global aspects of self-organization processes and exploring indicators of the kind of emergent communication patterns. More specifically, we will focus on the constitution of the system as a coherent whole which can maintain a dynamic identity for a period of time. Since this type of self-organization into a coherent dynamic unit is hypothesized to be the core of mental life and neural organization (Van Orden et al, 2003), we want to explore the possible analogy with social life and political consciousness. (2)

Albeverio, Sergio, et al, eds. The Dynamics of Complex Urban Systems. Berlin: Springer, 2008. European geographers seem to be more attuned to view human social assemblies – towns, cities, metropolis – as evident manifestations in dynamic time and geometric space of universal nonlinear phenomena. This volume from a conference in Switzerland contains a variety of applied examples of such principles found everywhere else in nature to our own cohabitation. Exemplary papers are The Socio-Spatial Dynamics of Systems of Cities and Innovation Processes by Denise Pumain, Fractal Geometry for Measuring and Modelling Urban Patterns, Pierre Frankhauser, and Juval Portugali’s A Structural-Cognitive Approach to Urban Simulation Models.

Applying the idea of self-organization leads to introducing a fractal order parameter for studying the emergent fractal order in urban patterns. The presentation of these quantitative results will be completed by some reflections about how planning concepts based on fractal geometry may help to manage more efficiently urban sprawl. (Frankhauser 213)

A central insight that emerges from this project/adaptation is that cities, like languages, are dual self-organizing systems: The city as a whole is a complex self-organizing system, and each of the many agents operating in the city is a complex self-organizing system by itself too. (Portugali 365)

Allen, Peter. Cities and Regions as Self-Organizing Systems. Amsterdam: Gordon & Breach, 1997. A pioneer theorist of social complexity reviews dynamical, emergent systems, their occurence in urban environments and transportation patterns and how an awareness of such properties can lead to more viable cities and towns. Allen’s work, with many colleagues, is an example of how the presence of independent, endemic processes which once found can then be intentionally applied to create a better society.

Alvarez-Ramirez, J., et al. Fractality and Time Correlation in Contemporary War. Chaos, Solitons and Fractals. 34/4, 2007. Even the chaos and carnage of the Iraq madness, (not even a ‘war’ because who is fighting who and why shifts daily) can be seen to take on a mathematical basis. However might we altogether discover this greater Galilean dimension as a natural scripture that if mindfully read altogether could teach us peace.

To address these questions, we have studied the 2003–2006 Iraq war. Evidence of fractal scale-invariance is found in the density distribution of military and civilian deaths, which present heavy-tails modeled as fractal power laws. On the other hand, by using detrended fluctuation analysis, our results suggests that daily attacks are time correlated, meaning that an attack is not fully independent from the attacks in previous days. While military fatalities showed a correlation behavior similar to that observed for attacks, civilian fatalities showed a different correlation behavior: if one consider civilian fatalities for time scales within 31 days, the sequence is unpredictable (uncorrelated). However, for time scales larger than 31 days, the sequence of daily civilian fatalities is correlated with correlation behavior similar to that for the daily attack sequence.

Arthur, W. Brian, et al, eds. The Economy as an Evolving Complex System II. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997. The application of nonlinear science to market commerce exhibits a common dynamics driven by positive feedback.

Arthur,, W. Brian. Foundations of Complexity Economics. Nature Review Physics. 3/2, 2021. The veteran systems economist, author and speaker is now at the Santa Fe Institute after a long career at Stanford University. This latest paper is a succinct survey of his pioneer, revolutionary reconception of commercial and financial behaviors by way of their real basis in nonlinear active agent dynamics. Some 150 references provide a good review in support. See also Economics in Nouns and Verbs by B. Arthur at arXiv:210401868 for a similar complementarity.

Conventional, neoclassical economics assumes agents (firms, consumers, investors) who face well-defined problems and arrive at consistent equilibrium behaviours. This rational system produces an elegant economics, but is restrictive and often unrealistic. Complexity economics relaxes these assumptions. It assumes that agents differ, that they have imperfect information and must try to make sense of the situation they face. The resulting outcome may not be in equilibrium and may display novel patterns and emergent phenomena. The economy becomes something not given but constantly forming from a developing set of actions, strategies and beliefs — something not mechanistic, static, timeless and perfect but organic, always creating itself, alive and full of messy vitality. (Abstract excerpt)

Baccini, Peter and Paul Brunner. Metabolism of the Anthroposphere. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012. A new edition of this 1991 classic work. Baccini is a Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETH), emeritus professor of Resource Management, and Brunner a Vienna University of Technology professor of Water Quality, Resources, and Waste Management. In brief, only an enlightened, respectful recreation of our anthropic presence and impact as a truly viable organism with its (her/his) own metabolic homeostasis and humane bicameral brain, of salutary value to both planet and person, can save and sustain us all.

Over the last several thousand years of human life on Earth, agricultural settlements became urban cores, and these regional settlements became tightly connected through infrastructures transporting people, materials, and information. This global network of urban systems, including ecosystems, is the anthroposphere; the physical flows and stocks of matter and energy within it form its metabolism. This book offers an overview of the metabolism of the anthroposphere, with an emphasis on the design of metabolic systems. It takes a cultural historical perspective, supported with methodology from the natural sciences and engineering. The authors describe the characteristics of material stocks and flows of human settlements in space and time; introduce the method of material flow analysis (MFA) for metabolic studies; analyze regional metabolism and the material systems generated by basic activities; and offer four case studies of optimal metabolic system design: phosphorus management, urban mining, waste management, and mobility. (Publisher)

Baccini, Peter and Paul Brunner. Metabolism of the Anthroposphere. Cambridge: MIT Press,, 2024. Peter Baccini is Professor Emeritus at ETH Zurich and Paul Brunner is a Vienna University of Technology environmentalist. This latest book is updated from their 1991 and 2012 editions and continues to present a unique anatomic, physiological, and cognitive version of many human habitations as a way to better plan, guide and improve.

Over the past thousand years of human life, agricultural settlements became urban cores, and became connected through infrastructures of people, materials, and information. This present citified network along with ecosystems is known as the anthroposphere. But in our view, the physical flows and stocks of matter and energy within it take on a form as a metabolism. This book takes a cultural historical perspective, with methodologies from the natural sciences and engineering. (Publisher)

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