
Are Cities Too Complicated? - state_machine
http://www.citylab.com/tech/2016/09/are-cities-getting-too-complicated/496556/
======
tsunamifury
This is the fundamental premise that object oriented thinking was created to
solve. You cannot understand a sufficiently advanced system from both an
overview and granular view. You have to either see the overview and trust the
granular objects, or specialize in one granular object and then trust your
adjacent objects.

Its a problem written about in detail by Marcus Aurelius in Meditations when
he comments on running an empire. He notes that the most difficult part is not
having information in a timely fashion at scale -- you can either have timely
information about a single place, or out of date information about the entire
empire.

They key part in both is trust and responsibility. You must trust that
granular objects can take responsibility for themselves. If each one requires
knowledge of the entire system to function, then the weight of that will
overburden any system over time.

~~~
pdkl95
> If each one requires knowledge of the entire system

The general problem is the growing number of dependencies. James Burke in
"Connections" warned that civilization is an interconnected web of _technology
traps_ [1]. We survive as long as everything works (or "mostly" works), but
there is a risk of cascade failure.

More recently, Dan Geer warned[2] about the same type of problem:

    
    
        In the last couple of years, I've found that institutions that I more
        or less must use [...] no longer accept paper letter they each only
        accept digital delivery of such instructions.  This means that each of
        them has created a critical dependence on an Internet swarming with
        men in the middle and, which is more, they have doubtlessly given
        up their own ability to fall back to what worked for a century before.
        [...]
        Everything in meatspace we give over to cyberspace replaces
        dependencies that are local and manageable with dependencies that are
        certainly not local and I would argue much less manageable because
        they are much less secure.  I say that because the root cause of risk
        is dependence, and most especially dependence on expectations of
        system state.
        [...]
        Accommodating old methods and Internet rejectionists preserves
        alternate, less complex, more durable means and therefore bounds
        dependence. Bounding dependence is *the* core of rational risk
        management.
    

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKELMR6wACw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKELMR6wACw)

[2]
[http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt](http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt)

~~~
kansface
I don't think it matters too much that most institutions no longer accept
paper since paper is just the external interface. You get no more reliability
if they did when all critical processes rely on technology.

In other words, you aren't walking your check to the IRS, the postal service
couldn't deliver it, your bank couldn't cash it even if they did, and WTF
would the IRS do with a billion checks?

~~~
pdkl95
The point isn't really that paper is _better_. It's that we had systems that
worked for a long time and we _removed_ them. We shouldn't need to walk lots
of checks to the IRS, that's the point of modern tech.

However, the IRS maintaining the capability of using old, simpler methods
should be retained because it serves as a backup for (hopefully rare)
situations where the primary infrastructure fails.

~~~
dragonwriter
> The point isn't really that paper is better. It's that we had systems that
> worked for a long time and we removed them.

Because we have better ones, that are less expensive, in many (but not all,
due to excessive design rigidity in some cases) cases cheaper to adapt to
change, and provide more value. That benefit is significantly limited if you
bear the cost of maintaining (across requirement changes) the old processes
(or analogs to them reliant on similar infrastructure) as well as the new
processes, especially if you have to maintain the infrastructure (including
the _human_ infrastructure -- e.g., for the IRS, of people trained to process
tax returns by hand) they rely on.

> However, the IRS maintaining the capability of using old, simpler methods
> should be retained because it serves as a backup for (hopefully rare)
> situations where the primary infrastructure fails.

Certainly, functions that are short-term critical need some fallback.
Functions that aren't, it may be more efficient to devote resources to
restoring the primary infrastructure rather than burning them executing
inefficient backup processes in the absence of primary infrastructure.

------
wellpast
> The Entanglement is a term from the computer scientist Danny Hillis,
> referring to a new era of technology that we find ourselves in, where no
> single individual can possibly understand what we ourselves have
> constructed. In other words, when even the experts are unable to fully grasp
> a system that they might have been themselves involved in the construction
> of, we are in a new era of incomprehensibility.

This is not a phenomenon of just cities or other large societal systems. In my
experience, this is already true for many a single company.

~~~
jandrese
It's true for life in general. It is a rare luxury to have and understand all
of the information before being asked to make a decision. This is why fields
like economics have traditionally been poor predictors of actual human
activity, they assume an ideal that is rarely true.

~~~
NTDF9
Reminds me of the trope that the choice should ALWAYS be left with consumers.
Every consumer is a 'rational actor'. Reality is most humans have too many
things going on, too many choices with not adequate info and are emotional
actors.

~~~
devereaux
Yet solutions emerge, even if individual agents have zero intelligence

[http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/Gode%20and%20Sunder-
JP...](http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/Gode%20and%20Sunder-JPE.pdf)

Your lack of belief in the force of the free hand is troubling, especially
when it can be proved by computer models and reality.

~~~
coddingtonbear
To clarify for the person you've responded to: the problem with humans isn't
exactly that we individually have _too little_ intelligence, it's that the
heuristics we have evolved to use for compensating for missing information
include a great deal of bias. This results in the very-well-documented lack of
rational actors in the real world.

------
jondubois
Cities have a dark side. I think that most people who grew up in a small town
and later moved to a big city have gone through a period of disillusionment.

~~~
wcummings
I don't want to seem mean, but you're like a caricature of a country person.
People are living things which grow to suit their environment, everyone thinks
their way is the best way and that their hometown is the coolest. When you say
things like "city people care more about money" and "city people are mean" you
sound like a bumpkin.

~~~
jomamaxx
Maybe he's a caricature, but he's 100% right.

I grew up going to school in the burbs, all summer in a small home-town - and
have lived in several major cities.

'City people' are definitely more about the money.

Small towns are communities. Everyone knows everyone - often for multiple
generations. Families have ties - not just people. You can't 'not care about'
someone you've known for 40 years, even if you don't know them that well.

In cities, people are exposed to a lot more people, they have tons of
'associates' but very few friends. People come and go - and they get
individualist.

I find city people, having been exposed to 'more kinds of people' tend to be
more 'tolerant' in the modern sense of that word, but have absolutely no idea
what community means and are far more judgemental, ideological, selective in
everything. City people walk and talk with a kind of 'facade' \- they are
trying to project an image - almost all of them. In a small town - this would
seem ridiculous.

Also in small towns - when people speak to you - they are _speaking to you_
then are 'present'. In the city, people are usually polite - but conversations
(and relationships) 'transactional'.

My brother (small town) threw a big bar-b-q for his friends birthday, and
invited a bunch of people. Some really odd red-necky types showed up - and
don't mean negative - just poor. They were welcome. Old guys in wheelchairs.
Young partiers. It was an unbelievably mixed crowd. I don't think my brother
would have preferred they came - but there is no way on earth anyone would say
anything - after all 'it's joe from the corner store' \- and 'Mary, Sean from
across the streets Aunt'. When you go to social gatherings in urban areas -
they tend to be hyper-specific in terms of social groupings.

Even the near-homeless/poor people in small towns 'know someone' and most
people 'know them' by name. Down the street from where I live (urban) - there
are a couple of completely 'nameless' homeless people.

Also - small town people tend to have a lot of gatherings where it's mostly
family. In the city, often less so. When you hang around mostly your family
and extended friends, it's a completely different world from 'people your age
in your clique' etc..

The craziest thing about this - is 'city people' often have absolutely no idea
what a community actually is. They make all sorts of crazy assertions, but
have no clue.

You call this guy a 'bumpkin' because - no offence - you might not know what
he is talking about - also - your comment might be a kind of bigotry.

In the suburb where I grew up - I don't know anyone. They've all moved. I have
some contact - but the people, stores, restaurants, neighbourhood - totally
unrecognizable. My 'hometown' \- I still know some people, epc. through
family. It's incredibly boring, and would be nary impossible to live there (it
would be nice if it were a commute from a city), but if I don't go back often
enough, I go crazy.

To someone from a small town, living in a city often feels like 'living in a
corporation' \- and to some extent they are correct.

~~~
warfangle
> Some really odd red-necky types showed up - and don't mean negative - just
> poor. They were welcome. Old guys in wheelchairs. Young partiers. It was an
> unbelievably mixed crowd.

And had a trans person showed up, how would that have gone? A Latinx person? A
queer couple?

Had the opposite experience moving from a suburb to a major metropolitan area.

There's a level of community here (not all communities are communities that
straight white tech workers are involved with or are welcome in) that is
unparalleled.

It may cause the hyper privileged to become more individualistic but for
everyone else we have thriving communities with true friendships and support
networks.

~~~
pjc50
I believe the term is "communities of choice". In a small community there is
only one community and everyone has to be in it, for good or ill. In a city
you _can_ make a much better community suited to you - but it requires active
effort to maintain that link, so it's much easier to fall off and become
invisibly alone.

~~~
jomamaxx
I agree - except that 'communities of choice' are far more fleeting than
otherwise. In 'communities of choice' \- nobody cares about old people, for
example.

'Communities of choice' work when you're young OR when you're part of a
specific ethnic group (say Somalis in Philly or whatever) - which is in many
ways like a 'small town' within a city.

------
mwsherman
Another word for complexity is diversity. Resilience comes from that
complexity. Very much like biology.

NYC (where I live) is wildly inefficient, except at delivering benefits that
millions of people consider worthwhile.

~~~
endswapper
Your point is a step in the right direction. Life is complex and diverse.
Cities serve as models. Daily life is a test of the inputs and results. Every
day they can be reconfigured and the data analyzed.

------
ngrilly
The article doesn't answer the question stated in the title.

~~~
khedoros
I see statements equivalent to these in the article:

\- Cities are inefficient Rube-Goldberg contraptions

\- Portions of city systems are too complex for one person to understand

\- We see evidence of complex, unpredictable systems when things go wrong

\- Cities have multiple complex systems that can and do produce unpredictable
failures

\- Methods inspired by scientific study may help us improve city life

I'd summarize it as: Here are some problems caused by complexity, and here are
some (vague) ideas for how to fix them. From the article's content, I think
there's an implied "yes" answer to the title.

------
Elof
John Edgar (former VP Strategy at DigitalOcean) and his team are working on
and writing about this extensively >> medium.com/city-as-a-service/

~~~
strictnein
Just being helpful: [http://medium.com/city-as-a-
service/](http://medium.com/city-as-a-service/)

------
contingencies
_Use the right kind of probe to see the right level of detail._ \- Mark
Burgess

 _Make our comprehension of the world more manageable by limiting the amount
of information we have to interact with at any time. Our experience of the
world can be made comprehensible, or incomprehensible, by design._ \- Mark
Burgess

 _The effect of limited information is that we perceive and build the world as
a collection of containers, patches or environments, separated from one
another by limited information flow. These structures define characteristic
scales._ \- Mark Burgess

 _The more details we can see, the less we have a sense of control._ \- Mark
Burgess

 _Separation of concerns ... a necessary consequence of loss of resolution due
to scale ... a strategy for staying sane._ \- Mark Burgess

These quotes are all from _In Search of Certainty: The Science of Our
Information Infrastructure (2013)_ , via my fortune database
[https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup](https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup)

------
dredmorbius
Can anyone with access to the book please answer whether or not Geoffrey West,
Joseph Tainter, or W. Brian Arther are among the cited references?

I'm flipping quickly through a copy of Arbesman's _The Half-Life of Facts_ and
am disappointed to see that he (or his editors) have fallen prey to the gross
misconception that numbered footnotes and bibliographies somehow diminish a
book's value. Quite the opposite. (THLoF has end notes, but they're not
indicated within the text, and insted reference pages and passages, which is a
form of torture to be included in a future revision of the Geneva Convention.)

------
tomkat0789
I don't know how useful biological ideas will be to urban planning, but this
sentence tickled my brain:

"...This can include such things as cataloging bugs and unexpected behaviors
in our infrastructure (like how a naturalist might collect insects)"

This sounds like what anybody working on a computer can use at a place like
Stack Overflow. People have problems, post a description of it, and somebody
else who happens to know helps them. The result of this process is available
to others on the web who might have a similar issue.

~~~
pjc50
e.g. [https://www.fixmystreet.com/](https://www.fixmystreet.com/)

------
sturadnidge
Joseph Tainter has done some interesting work on the relation between societal
complexity and collapse[1], here's a recent(ish) paper of his on the subject
[http://wtf.tw/ref/tainter_2006.pdf](http://wtf.tw/ref/tainter_2006.pdf)

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-
Ar...](https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-
Archaeology/dp/052138673X)

------
FrozenVoid
They are often overcomplicated due lack of planning(environmental,
ergonomics/accessibility), ad-hoc building design driven by commercial
interest and persistent ignorance of users(cities are user-unfriendly) needs.
Unless the bureaucrats are faced with public anger/complaints they would defer
to major companies and investors opinion of what the city needs. While some
problems like fracking are really noticeable(creating wide-spread publicity),
the corporate power creep seems invisible to average joe who blissfully thinks
the city is made for him. Infrastructure is not actually people-centric, its
built to maximize utility/efficiency providing minimum standard that is
"acceptable" instead of striving to improve the city(solving the problem the
quick way).

------
yason
_Cities have developed in a complex and often fascinating manner, but along
the way, we have portions of these systems that are more complex than any
single person can understand._

Just like life itself.

------
kazinator
Betteridge's law is fumbling here: yes, perhaps they are. Big, old cities are
full of ancient infrastructure that slips through the cracks. People depend on
it, and nobody knows exactly where its networks are routed; then when it
breaks, it's a big disaster.

~~~
ItsDeathball
On the other hand, perhaps the answer is that they're just complicated enough.
If the big, old cities didn't provide a unique economic advantage through
their increased interconnectivity then no one would stick around to tolerate
that ancient infrastructure.

~~~
devereaux
Huh, path dependance. By virtue of existence and being big enough, they are
worth sticking to.

