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A Sourcebook for the Worldwide Discovery of a Creative Organic Universe
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VII. Our Earthuman Ascent: A Major Evolutionary Transition in Individuality

3. Planetary Physiosphere: Anatomics, Economics, Urbanomics

Batty, Michael and Paul Longley. Fractal Cities. New York: Academic Press, 1994. A pervasive self-organized geometry is found to repetitively apply across many similar scales from neighborhoods to a metropolis.

Becker, Kurt, et al. Complex Urban Systems. European Physical Journal Special Topics. 231/9, 2022. Center for Urban Science and Progress, Tandon School of Engineering, NYU scholars introduce this issue with this subtitle: A Living Lab to Understand Urban Processes and Solve Complex Problems subtitle. To wit, into these 2020s it is now possible to proceed on a whole scale revision guided by complex network dynamics, so as to achieve a much better viability. Some entries are Ridership Prediction in Transportation Hubs, Analytical Fault Impact Model for the Electrical Grid, and Integrative Urban AI to Expand Coverage, Access and Equity.

Beinhocker, Eric. The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2006. The author is a theoretical economist and Senior Fellow at the McKinsey Global Institute based in London. While one of the ten best business books of 2006, the work goes much beyond the dismal science to propose a major revision of traditional 19th and 20th century equilibrium models, of which a lucid survey is given, to a 21st century Complexity Economics. In its support, a clear introduction to nonlinear science is provided, drawing on expositors such as John Holland and Stuart Kauffman, so as to distill a ubiquitous natural and social dynamic system. These common qualities distinguish: independent agents fluidly interact, guided by tacit rules, within a landscape, which evolves and emerges, unbeknownst, to a higher degree of order. And viola, here is a scientific explanation of Adam Smith’s invisible hand: from such diverse micro activities and local communication thus arises the self-similar macro patterns. By so doing, Beinhocker, akin to biologist Robert Reid 2006, puts a self-organizing spontaneity in front of natural selection, another sign of this imminent revolution.

With the advent of inexpensive, high-powered computers in the 1980’s, scientists began to make rapid progress in understanding complex adaptive systems in the natural world and to see such systems as forming a universal class, with many common behaviors. In fact, many biologists have come to view evolutionary systems as just one particular type, or subclass, of complex adaptive systems. (18)

Ben-Hamouche, Mustapha. Can Chaos Theory Explain Complexity In Urban Fabric? Applications in Traditional Muslim Settlements. Nexus Network Journal. 11/2, 2009. In this publication for “Architecture and Mathematics,” a University of Bahrain civil engineer uses nonlinear dynamics to reveal that Muslim cities across a wide range including Baghdad, Damascus, Jerusalem and Medina in fact express a nested fractal organization. We all walk upon and live amidst a natural and social scripture if only we might in such fashion learn to see and read.

Far from comprising a mere increase in size and an enlargement of scale, the internal structure of traditional urban fabrics was characterized from the domestic level to the city level by a striking degree of self-similarity. (240)

Benoit, Jerome and Saif Eddin Jabari. On the Perturbation of Self-Organized Urban Street Networks. Applied Network Science. 4/49, 2019. NYU Abu Dhabi engineers proceed to extend and root our large and small neighborhood byways deeply into the principles and processes of statistical and information physics. See also Structure Entropy, Self-Organization, and Power Laws in Urban Street Networks by the authors at arXiv:1902.07663, and How the Geometry of Cities Explains Urban Scaling Laws by Carlos Molinero and Stefan Thurner at 1908.07470.

Bettencourt, Luis. Introduction to Urban Science: Evidence and Theory of Cities as Complex Systems. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2021. The veteran systems scholar is now at the University of Chicago as a professor of Urban Innovation. His survey of the 21st century understandings, after Michael Batty and Marc Bartholemy, of human habitations in many ways as dynamic, evolving, fractal-like organisms achieves a latest authoritative contribution,

Bettencourt, Luis. The Origins of Scaling in Cities. Santa Fe Institute Working Papers. 12-09-014, 2012. The SFI and LANL systems geographer (search) continues this project to quantify urban settlements everywhere, of any and all sizes and kinds, as stratified, self-similar exemplars of natural, independent, universally manifest generative principles. See also, with Andres Gomez-Lievano and HyeJin Youn, “The Statistics of Urban Scaling and Their Connection to Zipf’s Law” in PLoS One (7/7, 2012). So many comparable studies of late vividly express and attest to a deeper mathematical, informative, indeed genetic-like, source. Subsequent SFI Working Papers “Urban Scaling in Prehispanic Central Mexico” by Scott Ortman, et al (13-01-001), and “The Hypothesis of Urban Scaling” Luis Bettencourt, et al (13-01-004), further confirm an invariant spatial and temporal universality from biomolecules to a metropolis. In regard, a March 2013 SFI posting (13-03-008) "The Kind of Problem a City Is" by Bettencourt takes this title from 50 years ago by the urban architect Jane Jacobs to evince how this nascent view of "cities as complex adaptive systems" can finally fulfill this vital understanding.

Cities are perhaps the ultimate expression of human sociality displaying at once humanity’s greatest achievements and some of its most difficult challenges. The greatest difficulties to any scientific approach to cities have resulted from their many interdependent facets, as social, economic, infrastructural and spatial complex systems, which exist in similar but changing forms over a huge range of scales. Here, I show how cities may evolve following a small set of basic principles that operate locally and can explain how cities change gradually from the bottom-up. As a result I obtain a theoretical framework that derives the general open-ended properties of cities through the optimization of a set of local conditions. This framework is used to predict, in a unified and quantitative way, the average social, spatial and infrastructural properties of cities as a set of scaling relations that apply to all urban systems, many of which have been observed in nations around the world. Finally, I compare and contrast the structure and dynamics of cities to those of other complex systems that share some analogous properties. (Bettencourt Abstract)

Urban scaling relations characterizing how diverse properties of cities vary on average with their population size have recently been shown to be a general quantitative property of many urban systems around the world. However, in previous studies the statistics of urban indicators were not analyzed in detail, raising important questions about the full characterization of urban properties and how scaling relations may emerge in these larger contexts. Here, we build a self-consistent statistical framework that characterizes the joint probability distributions of urban indicators and city population sizes across an urban system. To develop this framework empirically we use one of the most granular and stochastic urban indicators available, specifically measuring homicides in cities of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, three nations with high and fast changing rates of violent crime. We use these data to derive the conditional probability of the number of homicides per year given the population size of a city. To do this we use Bayes’ rule together with the estimated conditional probability of city size given their number of homicides and the distribution of total homicides. Knowledge of these distributions implies, in turn, a relationship between scaling and population size distribution exponents that can be used to predict Zipf’s exponent from urban indicator statistics. Our results also suggest how a general statistical theory of urban indicators may be constructed from the stochastic dynamics of social interaction processes in cities. (PLoS One Abstract)

Bettencourt, Luis. The Use of Big Data in Cities. Big Data. 2/1, 2014. In this trendy new journal, the Santa Fe Institute systems scientist contends that collections of countless of statistical bits will be insufficient to reveal or explain anything. An addition of the real nonlinear interactions and relations between all of them, via the principles of complexity systems science, need to be factored in. For a similar take see Industrial Ecology: The View from Complex Systems by Bettencourt and Christa Breisford in the Journal of Industrial Ecology (19/2, 2015), along with other articles from that issue in Viable Gaia.

This dilemma between the need for planning and coordination and its impossibility in detail is resolved by the recognition that cities are first and foremost self-organizing social networks embedded in space and enabled by urban infrastructure and services. As such the primary role of big data in cities is to facilitate information flows and mechanisms of learning and coordination by heterogeneous individuals. However, processes of self-organization in cities, as well as of service improvement and expansion, must rely on general principles that enforce necessary conditions for cities to operate and evolve. Such ideas are the core a developing scientific theory of cities, which is itself enabled by the growing availability of quantitative data on thousands of cities worldwide, across different geographies and levels of development. (Abstract)

Bettencourt, Luis, et al. Growth, Innovation, Scaling, and the Pace of Life in Cities. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 104/7301, 2007. A collaboration of Los Alamos Laboratories, Arizona State University, Dresden University of Technology, and the Santa Fe Institute modeled three urban categories: material infrastructure (road surfaces, electrical cables, etc.), human needs (energy consumption and housing) and patterns of social activity (bank deposits, new cases of AIDS, new patents filed). One of the most sophisticated studies of how human congregations actually take on and fulfill a further nested stage of viable organic metabolism and personality. A popular synopsis of this advance is the article The Living City by Jonah Lerner in the science magazine Seed for August 2007.

Despite its amazing diversity and complexity, life manifests an extraordinary simplicity and universality in how key structural and dynamical processes scale across a broad spectrum of phenomena and an immense range of energy and mass scales covering >20 orders of magnitude. (7302) Most of these indicators deal with temporal processes associated with the social dimension of cities as spaces for intense interaction across the spectrum of human activities. It is remarkable that it is principally in terms of these rhythms that cities are self-similar organizations, indicating a universality of human social dynamics, despite enormous variability in urban form. (7305)

Bettencourt, Luis, et al. The Interpretation of Urban Scaling Analysis in Time. Journal of the Royal Society Interface. February, 2020. In this consummate, integral year, University of Chicago, Santa Fe Institute, and Arizona State University theorists including Jose Lobo can proceed to quantify and affirm that our citified human habitations are indeed graced and braced by nested, recurrent similarities. By so doing, as many others attest, a sense of a metabolic urban organicity is akin to everywhere else is achieved. By virtue of these advances which imply a mathematic guidance, better self-organized abides can be availed.

Bettencourt, Luis, et al. The Self-Similarity of Human Social Organization and Dynamics in Cities. Lane, David, et al, eds. Complexity Perspectives in Innovation and Social Change. Berlin: Springer, 2009. With co-authors Jose Lobo and Geoffrey West, an effort to quantify how cities really might be analogously akin to biological organisms. In so doing, a universality of hierarchical network patterns and information processes are found to grace urban settlements of all kinds no matter where on earth or in history. One wonders if a term such as “urbanism” might be an apt for this viable organic social abidance. See also “The Organization of Urban Systems” by Anne Bretagnolle, et al, in the same volume.

We have shown that power law scaling is a pervasive property of human social organization and dynamics in cities and holds across time and for different nations with very different levels of development, economic sector distribution, and with different cultural norms and geographic location. This is an extraordinary assertion indicating that, on average, different cities are scaled up versions of each other, particularly in terms of rhythms of social activity – such as the creation of wealth and ideas, infectious contacts and crime, and patterns of human behavior. (234)

Bettencourt, Luis, et al. Urban Scaling and Its Deviations: Revealing the Structure of Wealth, Innovation and Crime across Cities. PLoS One. 5/11, 2010. With co-authors Jose Lobo, Santa Fe Institute, Deborah Strumsky, University of North Carolina, and Geoffrey West, LANL, an extensive quantification is achieved of a nested invariance from neighborhoods to metropolis. Several prime parameters as noted that appear to hold independently of city or nation are described with a validity not possible earlier. But philosophical reflection is in order as one more example of an implicate, mathematical source that manifestly structures and guides our personal and communal lives, that we are just becoming aware of, and can intentionally avail for a more humane abide.

In this paper, we have proposed a systematic procedure for solving the long-standing problem of constructing meaningful, science-based metrics for ranking and assessing local features of cities. By using nonlinear urban scaling laws as a baseline, our procedure accounts for the underlying principles and socioeconomic dynamics that give rise to cities to distinguish general effects of urbanism from local dynamics and, consequently, leads to a much simpler and direct perspective into the local factors that make or break specific places. (6) The general regularity of urban scaling laws and of the statistics of their deviations point to the possibility of a general theory of cities that can account for the essence of these interactions and predict a small set of fundamental scaling regularities common to all urban systems. (6)

From this viewpoint, the general statistically stable properties of cities emerge as a hierarchy of interrelated fundamental quantities. (7) Analogously, we have shown that scaling laws for socioeconomic and infrastructural metrics persist over time and across every nation that has been studied, and that these organize urban quantities into two broad universality classes of dynamics that manifest either increasing returns to scale (socioeconomic quantities) or economies of scale (material infrastructure) both to approximately the same degree. (7) It is therefore extraordinary that, despite the immense diversity of human and social behavior, the dynamics and organization of urban systems, as well as of individual cities, is an emergent predictable phenomenon. (7)

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