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

3. Planetary Physiosphere: Anatomics, Economics, Urbanomics

Stock, Gregory. Metaman: The Merging of Humans and Machines into a Global Superorganism. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. Although heavy on technology, a proficient survey of a planetary metabolism and its evolving brain.

Strano, Emanuele, et al. The Scaling Structure of the Global Road Network. Royal Society Open Science. October, 2017. As a regnant humankinder proceeds to recognize and measure her/his nascent self, Harvard, MIT, University of North Carolina, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and École Polytechnique Fédérale Lausanne researchers avail new capacities of Google Earth surveys to discern metabolic anatomy and physiology circulation systems.

Because of increasing global urbanization and its immediate consequences, including changes in patterns of food demand, circulation and land use, the next century will witness a major increase in the extent of paved roads built worldwide. To model the effects of this increase, it is crucial to understand whether possible self-organized patterns are inherent in the global road network structure. Here, we use the largest updated database comprising all major roads on the Earth, together with global urban and cropland inventories, to suggest that road length distributions within croplands are indistinguishable from urban ones. Such similarity extends to road length distributions within urban or agricultural domains of a given area. Scaling regimes suggest that simple and universal mechanisms regulate urban and cropland road expansion at the global scale. As such, our findings bear implications for global road infrastructure growth based on land-use change and for planning policies sustaining urban expansions. (Abstract excerpt)

Tachet, Remi, et al. Scaling Law of Urban Ride Sharing. Nature Scientific Reports. 7/42868, 2017. MIT, Senseable City Lab informatics, scientists, along with the Cornell University’s Steven Strogatz, find that this hyperactive service yet can be found to manifest common mathematical regularities. If their intrinsic, formative presence can be discerned and availed it could much improve its public use.

Sharing rides could drastically improve the efficiency of car and taxi transportation. Unleashing such potential, however, requires understanding how urban parameters affect the fraction of individual trips that can be shared, a quantity that we call shareability. Using data on millions of taxi trips in New York City, San Francisco, Singapore, and Vienna, we compute the shareability curves for each city, and find that a natural rescaling collapses them onto a single, universal curve. We explain this scaling law theoretically with a simple model that predicts the potential for ride sharing in any city, using a few basic urban quantities and no adjustable parameters. Accurate extrapolations of this type will help planners, transportation companies, and society at large to shape a sustainable path for urban growth. (Abstract)

Taylor, Mark. Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World without Redemption. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Along the way to his novel rethinking of theology via complex adaptive systems science, they are adroitly employed, some 4 years too early to catch the wave, to get a better handle on financial frenzies. The last chapter does engage deism with a timeline from original Monistic (present, immanent) to Dualistic (absent, transcendent) to current Complex (neither absent or present, transcendent or immanent), but alas without any hope for a Divine bailout.

Life in all its complexity remains a confidence game in which the abiding challenge is not to find redemption but to learn to live without it. (13) When understood as complex adaptive systems, webs and networks are self-reflexive structures. That is to say, individual agents and systems – be they social, political, religious, or economic – are interrelated in such a way that neither can exist without the other. (284) In the final analysis, the problem is not to find redemption from a world that often seems dark but to learn to live without redemption in a world where the interplay of light and darkness creates infinite shades of difference, which are inescapably disruptive, overwhelming beautiful, and infinitely complex. (331)

Tirico, Michele, et al. Morphogenesis of Street Networks: A Reaction-Diffusion System for Self-Organized Cities. arXiv:2111.03544. Normandy University complexity scholars provide a latest explanation based on Alan Turing’s mathematical programs, as they become verified everywhere so it seems, of how even active urban topologies can similarly be found to take on a metabolic, super-organism-like essence. Some 75 years later, might such an advent of a dynamic global knowledge ever mitigate and save us.

Urban morphogenesis is the process of formation of its elements and the specialization of its suburbs. Street networks are the structural part of the system. Understand their formation reveals crucial information about urban transformation and dynamics behind its functioning. In this work we focus on the morphogenesis of street networks and we study it through a spatial network generator model. This latter is composed by three layers (a reaction-diffusion layer, a dynamic vector field and a spatial network) surrounded by an environment. The emerging network feeds back to its morphogenetic elements, driving the model to an unexpected behaviour. (Abstract)

Urry, John. Global Complexity. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2003. The Lancaster University sociologist extends the “complexity turn” (see also Urry and Fraser in Human Societies) to an international scope where dynamic, iterative, autopoietic, self-making systems can similarly be found.

Global systems can be viewed as interdependent, as self-organizing and as possessing emergent properties. (14)

Viceconti, Marco, et at, eds. The Virtual Physiological Human. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A. 366/2973, 2008. An issue dedicated to “a framework for computational biomedicine” that can “enable investigations of the human body as an integrated whole” vs. previous subdivisions and isolations of maladies, organs, functions, and so on. At once, one might observe the project as if a personal humankind is attending to the fraught creatures from whom it has sprung. But also by a turn, ought not this same approach be applied, as James Lovelock stridently advocates, to a planetary physiology?

Volchenkiv, Dmitri and Philippe Blanchard. Scaling and Universality in City Space Syntax. Physica A. 387/2353, 2008. Researchers at Bielefeld University studied five urban areas –present day Manhattan, Venice and Amsterdam, along with towns of medieval origin – Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Bavaria, and Bielefeld, Germany. In each example the same ‘social dynamic’ and ‘scaling phenomena’ was observed which suggests, as the case everywhere else, universal complex networks and systems equally inform our human habitation.

Universal statistical behavior of space syntax measures uncovers the universality of the creation mechanism responsible for the appearance of nodes of high centrality which acts over all cities independently of their backgrounds. (2354) In urban studies, scaling and universality have been found with a remarkable regularity. (2357) The matching of power-law behaviors (the same scaling exponent) can have a deeper origin in the background dynamical process responsible for such a power-law relation. Being diverse in their sizes, forms, economical and political history, cities display nevertheless the identical scaling behavior and probably share the similar fundamental mechanisms of open spaces creation. (2357)

votsis, Athanasios and Riina Haavisto. Urban DNA and Sustainable Cities. Frontiers in Environmental Science. 7/4, 2019. We cite this entry because these Finnish Meteorological Institute, Helsinki geographers consider how a broadly conceived analog genetic-like source code may help explain many features of smaller and larger dynamic human habitations. See also A Model of Urban Evolution based on Innovation Diffusion by Juste Raimbault at arXiv:2004.15023 for similar views.

The concept of Urban DNA has served to describe how a set of growth parameters may encode the manner in which cities evolve in space and the forms they may assume. The five growth coefficients of the SLEUTH (Slope, Land-use, Exclusion, Urban, Transport, Hillshade) cellular automaton model of land use change are often seen as genetic in kind. It is also important to understand whether urban DNA classes relate to outcomes in terms of livability and sustainability. The results distinguish six such types of cities: multinodal, dispersed cities, with mixed outcomes; multinodal, contiguous, slow-growing; transport-oriented, dispersed, fast-growing; large, buzzy, constrained; dense, contiguous, fast-growing; and transport-oriented, contiguous, interactive cities. (Abstract excerpt)

The paper aims to develop a behavioral taxonomy of cities by discerning their urban DNA and exploring the performance of city types in a variety of livability and sustainability indicators and indices. (1-2) Urban (regional) DNA is an analogy to biological DNA: it consists of growth coefficients similar to how proteins compose biological DNA. The notion has found resonance in urban growth processes which encode rules that dictate how the repetition of elementary socio-spatial entities achieves certain urban forms and urban functions across scales. (3)

Wang, De, et al. Multifractal Analysis of Land Use Pattern in Space and Time. Ecological Complexity. Article in Press, 2010. A team of ecologists and geographers report a case study on the Loess Plateau of China which, as they conclude below, can be seen to suggest common, natural principles that manifest everywhere.

In our paper, three sites from the upper, middle and lower reaches of Yanhe watershed in the Loess Plateau were selected to test the scaling properties of agricultural landscape patterns in 1980, 2000 and 2006 using multifractal Rényi dimensions analysis. We found that: (1) the distributions of cropland, grassland and woodland patterns are multiscaling over nearly four orders of magnitude in scale, whereas water bodies and residential areas are not multifractally distributed, which may result from the resolution of Landsat TM remote sensing images; (2) spatially, the multifractal techniques are capable to uncover subtle differences in land use patterns between different reaches of the watershed that could correspond to their distinct, underlying abiotic and biotic processes; and (3) temporally, the multifractal spectra demonstrate little difference between 1980 and 2000 but a sharp change in 2006, the former depicting the land use patterns in an equilibrium state and the latter the effect of government policies such as large-scale eco-environment conservation programmes starting in the late 20th century. The fact that scaling behaviors exist across a heterogeneous landscape suggests that there may be some simple mechanism that governs agricultural landscape change.

Wei, Yun-Lan, et al. Multifractal Temporally Weighted Detrended Analysis to Quantify Power-Law Cross-Correlation and Its Application to Stock Markets. Chaos. 27/6, 2017. We note this paper in an American Institute of Physics journal by Xiangtan University, China, and Queensland University of Technology, Australia theorists as an example amongst many of how the same universal, mathematic self-similar dynamic seem to apply in each and every scale and instance from quantum and interstellar realms to financial commerce.

White, Roger, et al. Modeling Cities and Regions as Complex Systems: From Theory to Planning Applications. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015. By these mid 2010s it seems that every ascendant, nested strata from cosmos (Aschwanden) to chemistry (Banzhaf) to cities (Batty) has redefined and quantified themselves by way of “self-organizing, complex adaptive systems” (1). These self-similar omic archetypes of interacting agents lately reveal an infinite repetition in kind at each stage and instance. Here Roger White, Memorial University of Newfoundland, with Guy Engelen and Inge Uljee, Flemish Institute for Technological Research, Belgium show how human settlements from villages to a metropolis exemplify these animate phenomena.

Cities and regions grow (or occasionally decline), and continuously transform themselves as they do so. This book describes the theory and practice of modeling the spatial dynamics of urban growth and transformation. As cities are complex, adaptive, self-organizing systems, the most appropriate modeling framework is one based on the theory of self-organizing systems -- an approach already used in such fields as physics and ecology. The book presents a series of models, most of them developed using cellular automata (CA), which are inherently spatial and computationally efficient. It also provides discussions of the theoretical, methodological, and philosophical issues that arise from the models.

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