Science Fiction Urbanism

At Munich's annual Digital Life Design Conference last week, theoretical physicist Geoffrey West sat alongside Jeffrey Inaba and Bjarke Ingels on a panel on "Science Fiction Urbanism". West presented his scientific findings and Inaba and Ingels took on fiction and urbanism, respectively. Inaba proposed viable fictions and storytelling, while Ingels presented a new urban proposal of "hedonistic sustainability", epitomised in his Waste-To-Energy Plant project that takes the form of a ski slope in the middle of Copenhagen.

West on the other hand, a Santa Fe Institute Distinguished Professor and Former President, was schooled in particle physics and is more interested in the fundamental principles of this world – underlying laws that can be use to understand how systems work, from a forest to the dynamic organism of the city – than the minutiae of the everyday. His position is clear: we can only begin to change the world once we understand it.

His science tells us that, fundamentally, the larger cities are the more sustainable they become. That when a city doubles in size, everything increases by approximately 15%. 15% more resources are used. 15% more wealth is produced. People are 15% more productive. Crime increases by 15%. There is 15% more disease. As he terms it: the good, the bad, and the ugly are produced, all at 15%. He discussed the relationship between the scientific analysis of cities to the networks within them and suggests that corporations, like people, are evolutionary. They must and will die. We begin our conversation where West's talk ended; at the intersection of corporations and cities, architecture and social networking.

Tina DiCarlo: Let's begin where your talk left off, at the intersection of cities, corporations and social networking.
Geoffrey West: I would like to talk much more about bits of life, where it comes from in terms of the network and interactions. What we realise is that urbanisation is dominant process of this planet over last 300 years. All of the problems we are facing today from global warming to financial markets, risks and disease all have their origin in urbanisation. Unless we develop serious integrated comprehensive scientifically based theory of cities and corporation we will not make progress. Despite the diversity of organisms, if we look at any quantity, it scales in a simple way. The metabolic rate – how much energy do each of you need per second – to stay alive scales in biology in a nonlinear way. The more you have less you are. In cities the more you are, more you have: GDP, Crime, Patents, Income. Good. Bad. Ugly. They systematically increase together in 15%. And the pace of life, systemically gets faster. Walking speed in European cities systematically gets faster. Complex adaptive systems cannot be considered independently, they are an interdependent framework. And why do they come together? Because they are manifestations of social network interactions, that is the universal underlying quality, it is us, we are the ones that are underlying all this, our interaction. If cities scale superlinearly – i.e., the larger the get the more efficient they get – the corporations scale sublinearly – the larger they get the more unstable they get.

There were two points that ended your talk: The first asked whether we predict the death of corporations like Microsoft and Google?
Can we? I don't know the answer to that…
The great thing about cities is that they are multi-dimensional. The bigger the city the more competences there are, the more products they produce. They are diverse. Now companies start like that – guys sit around with some idea, let's do a search engine -- and before you know it they are billionaires But as a company typically starts to grow it has a bureaucracy. Cities have a bureaucracy, but a company has a serious bureaucracy because it gets confined, its dimensionality it is not like a city. As the company grows and is successful in its product that bureaucracy gets bigger and the innovation gets squeezed.

Why?
Because there are more and more controls and you loose that freedom. There is always that propensity. When companies get into trouble they try to make it more efficient and cut research. You know AT&T, Ford General Motors, had great research plans, they don't exist anymore. This was a statement that innovation is/was not important to us, what is important is infrastructure, saving money, and so on. This is the beginning of death.

Is this also what you go back to, that in order to lead to future growth there has to be continual innovation?
Exactly. And if you stop that you are signing your own long-term death warrant. Incidentally it is very important that companies die for the economy, in the same way that it is crucial that human beings die, because we want new things to come up and new innovation, new ideas. That what evolution is about.

What is the relationship between the fundamental principles of the cities and social networking? Or the model of the social networking company? And is this the next step of your work?
Yes. Exactly. Biology roughly speaking conceptually is pretty clear. We understand the networks: your circulatory system, your respiratory system, but also the network of the ecosystem, which is not connected. In a forest there is kind of a virtual network that connects them because they to share and allocate resources, which they do in a competitive environment. And that produces a network of the flow of resources that gets reflected in how the resources, the energy, water, get distributed throughout the tress. So all that gets worked out mathematically and it is quite powerful and so on. Now that has not been done for social networks.

Is entropy is the final state of the planet?
Not entropy, but is the state of the planet that human beings have a planet of slums?

Essentially what you are saying is that there is a continual cycle of rejunivation (growth) through innovation?
Yes that is the whole point. The trouble is now you have to do it faster and faster. So the question is can you have this kind of quality of life and standard of living, and wealth creation and innovation without growth and this kind of treadmill phenomenon. That's a huge question. That's THE question I am most interested in. And I don't know the answer. I am interested in the conceptual framework and how it all works.

Is that where there lies the most potential for change? That is you understand the (mechanistic) framework that you can begin to influence?
Yes. So I do have a faith. It's a faith statement. I believe in science. I think it has been a way to work out our universe. Us. And one of the things I think we've learned – and here is the faith – that if you understand something that is when you can best deal with it. Rather than always trial and error. And bullshit. And speculation. I mean you need that, and it is good. It churns up ideas. But you know people make all sorts of statement but no one ever back it up with anything.

But architecture is like that too. So is urbanism…
It is. Most of the urban modeling and urban development is done with a qualitatively framework. I want to compliment that by bringing a serious science based quantitative framework, and an argument to it.

Tina DiCarlo is a writer and curator living in London and Berlin. From 2000-2007 she was a curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Over the last three years she has been pursuing a strand of curating as a form of spatial practice that ties the high realm of architecture to four market sectors — investors, developers, global insiders and practitioners.