
The chaos and tangled energy of living cities - yurisagalov
http://aeon.co/magazine/living-together/the-chaos-and-tangled-energy-of-living-cities
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creamyhorror
Tangle is interesting because it adds texture to the experience of living in a
city - but it comes about organically. In Singapore, where I live, the city
center is fairly interesting, but the urban public-housing neighbourhoods
outside the core are mostly uniform in appearance and lack the variety of
forms and colors that would consitute tangle. Everything is similarly arranged
on a flat landscape of housing blocks and patches of green spaces; wiring and
services are all hidden behind walls or underground to keep things "neat" \-
the place was built by conformist public planners. There's a minimum of shops
scattered around these areas, because inhabitants are presumed not to want the
bustle and risks of crowds near their homes.

In contrast, the major Japanese (& European & American) cities have much more
variation and exposed complexity - more tangle. Their neighborhoods weren't
planned to the same extent, with the same drive towards neatness and hidden
complexity. Thus density alone doesn't generate tangle: age and the organic
bolting-on of new layers/services is required as well.

This man would have us living in the chaotic, multilayered megacities of
dystopian sci-fi - Kowloon Walled Cities writ large and cast into the future.
It's not an entirely unpleasant vision.

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pags
It's an entirely pleasant vision.

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gipp
This was beautiful. Just moved from Chicago to Austin, and this article
articulates everything I miss about Chicago better than I ever could. Spot-on.

The conclusion w.r.t "smart" cities was curious, though. I'd see "smartifying"
as something that would _add_ to the tangle, not subtract from it. Another
layer on top of all the others.

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jlees
Similarly, this article made me homesick for London.

I suppose one angle on smartness is that it provides a simplistic lens on the
tangle. If rather than observing the intersection of life, industry and
history around us, we tap a single-purpose button on our phones and stare
until like magic, the thing we want appears -- if the layers on a city become
intangible -- then we lose some of the glorious chaos that is urban life.

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davidgerard
Tangle is the thing I love about London. I'm from Perth, Australia, where the
tangle is very thin indeed - it's a big suburb. Melbourne is a bit better, but
I moved to London in 2002 then visited Melbourne again in 2004, and was
shocked how untangled it felt.

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davidgerard
One good reason to go "fuckit" and untangle is things like accessibility.
Retrofitting this is an _absolute arse_. Making inner London accessible would
basically require rebuilding it from scratch.

Thus, "tangle" is, in engineering terms, "technical debt".

I am a _huge_ fan of tangle in a city - it's what makes it livable and takes
away the artificiality of a new suburb. But engineering maintainability is the
countervailing force.

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saraid216
The problem, it must be said, is that unlike software engineering, ripping out
code is the equivalent of making many, many people homeless, even temporarily,
and gutting their history and culture. Sometimes that's the right thing to do,
but only sometimes.

I have yet to see any kind of cohesive philosophy giving guidelines on when
this is okay and when it is not.

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pnathan
I've often thought that cities represent a good metaphor for software
development: large systems, different designers through time, constant
maintenence, adaptation to odd quirks.

~~~
teddyh
“[…] _And these are programs that have existed for ten years or perhaps
fifteen years, growing piece by piece as one craftsman after an other added
new features.

Sort of like cities in France you might say, where you can see the extremely
old buildings with additions made a few hundred years later all the way up to
the present. Where in the field of computing, a program that was started in
1965 is essentially that. So we would always hope for tourists to become
system maintainers, and perhaps then they would get hired, after they had
already begun working on system programs and shown us that they were capable
of doing good work._”

— Richard Stallman, 1986

[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-
kth.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.html)

