from Hacker News

Are Cities Too Complicated?

by state_machine on 9/7/16, 5:08 PM with 69 comments

by tsunamifury on 9/7/16, 7:07 PM
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not having information in a timely fashion at scale -- you can either have timely information about a single place, or out of date information about the entire empire.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.
by wellpast on 9/7/16, 5:47 PM
> 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.
by jondubois on 9/7/16, 9:52 PM
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.
by mwsherman on 9/7/16, 10:14 PM
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.
by ngrilly on 9/7/16, 7:51 PM
The article doesn't answer the question stated in the title.
by Elof on 9/7/16, 7:07 PM
John Edgar (former VP Strategy at DigitalOcean) and his team are working on and writing about this extensively >> medium.com/city-as-a-service/
by contingencies on 9/8/16, 4:19 AM
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
by dredmorbius on 9/8/16, 12:38 AM
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.)
by tomkat0789 on 9/7/16, 7:36 PM
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.
by sturadnidge on 9/7/16, 10:29 PM
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
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-Ar...
by FrozenVoid on 9/8/16, 4:07 AM
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).
by yason on 9/8/16, 8:53 AM
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.
by kazinator on 9/7/16, 7:16 PM
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.