Tag Archives: Science

Review | Scale by Geoffrey West

Review | Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies by Geoffrey West
by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A, The Outlaw Urbanist Contributor

West implicitly – and falsely – argues a city IS a tree; an idea that comes to us pre-refuted some 40 years courtesy of Christopher Alexander.

When I first heard about Geoffrey West’s Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies (Penguin Books, 2017) during Congress for New Urbanism 26 in Savannah, Georgia in May, I was eager to purchase a copy and begin reading the book. Once I started, each page that I read reminded me more and more of a conversation between John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) and Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) in Jurassic Park (1993):

HAMMOND: Codswollop, Ian. You’ve never been able to sufficiently explain your concerns.
MALCOLM: Oh, John, John, John (???). Because of the behavior of the system in phase space!
HAMMOND: A load, if I may say so, of fashionable number crunching!

However, as an audience, we side with Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park because Jeff Goldblum is cool… and, well, dinosaurs are cool, too, except when they are eating you. However, being cool is not always a recipe for being right as anyone who attended high school can attest.

There are a lot of problems with West’s arguments and ideas in this book. This is not to say that there isn’t any potential value to be found in West’s Scale but you have to dig deep to find it; so deep that everyone should avoid the book except for only the most experienced and well-informed in the fields of biology, urban studies, and organizational research  I am not a biologist but I can see the potential value, as West argues, of establishing new medical baselines using scaling theory in the biological sciences. In the “Postscripts and Acknowledgements” at the end of the book, West admits these ideas have come under considerable criticism from people in the biological sciences. He dismisses this out-of-hand without actually mentioning or addressing what is the substance of these criticisms. I mention this because if West’s understanding of biological organisms is as naive as that of cities and companies, then the entire theoretical apparatus of Scale will collapse under the weight of West’s ambitions.

I am an urban researcher so I am well-placed to discuss the many flaws of West’s approach to cities (and, to a lesser extent, companies, given my background in the private sector). Allow me to recount only a few of the most significant flaws in West’s book:

• West adopt an extremely narrow definition of science, which basically means no one is a scientist who is not a theoretical physicist. There are multiple generations of urban researchers performing quantitative data collection and analysis (not only qualitative research and surveys, as West asserts in the book) at and associated with institutions of higher learning at Cambridge University, University College London, MIT, University of California-Berkeley, and many others around the world who will take exception to this definition. West appears to do so in the interest of scientific rigor and, initially, I was willing to go along with him on this narrow definition. I’m all for scientific rigor and prefer on to err on the side of caution, i.e., if the R-squared of a correlation isn’t above .50, then I ignore it as meaningless. However, it soon becomes clear that West only adopts this narrow definition as a defense mechanism to guard his own ideas against criticisms, which can be easily dismissed with a ‘you’re not a real scientist’ retort.

West presents some ideas as new that are only baked-over old ones; some very old. He asserts “cities are people” as if this is a new idea but West seems unaware that Spiro Kostof traced this paradigmatic approach to cities to Giovanni Botero in the early 17th century. Personally, I much prefer Jan Gehl’s approach that “cities are for people” but West seems unaware of the research of Gehl, William Whyte, and many others who have actually observed and quantified the human use of space in cities. In this, West also seems to have largely missed the point of Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities as he tends to exclusively focus on the economic aspects of her book. West only appears to stress the ‘cities are people’ approach so he can freely access available datasets, which have been collected (usually by public agencies) in a flawed manner. West briefly acknowledges the problems of boundary definition for such data collection in urban science. This is really problematic, especially for US census tracts. However, West then ignores the problem in his subsequent analyses. This is akin to an engineer saying “I can safely ignore gravity in my structural calculations because I have acknowledged its existence.”

• In the same vein, West calls for a new science of cities based on network theory but he seems blissfully unaware of Bill Hillier and space syntax, which is an approach tying quantitative observation of the human use of space especially movement with mathematical modeling of spatial networks based on topological graph theory. Space syntax represents more than four decades of substantial urban research based on a scientific approach. West’s ignorance – unintentional or purposeful, I don’t know – about space syntax is especially troubling because he does cite and mention Carlo Ratti at MIT and Mike Batty at UCL. A cursory review of their bibliographies should have led West directly to Bill Hillier and space syntax. Apparently, West did not bother to conduct such a bibliography search. Instead, his knowledge of cities seems limited to what people who are actively collaborating with the Santa Fe Institute are willing to tell him. West also dismisses the work of Batty (and, by implication, everyone else in the Centre for Spatial Analysis at UCL) with a casual “I don’t agree.” I have known Mike Batty for twenty years so I can argue that he should wear West’s dismissal like a badge of honor. I don’t always agree with Professor Batty but he knows a lot more about cities than Geoffrey West. The fact is a science of cities have been developing for a half-century in the field of urban studies, more or less beginning with researchers like Leslie Martin, Lionel March, and Philip Steadman in the (now-named) Martin Centre of Architectural and Urban Studies at Cambridge University in the 1960s and 1970s. To make his arguments in Scale, West has to pretend that we are living circa 1965 and none of this research exists. In this, West comes across the quintessential Baby Boomer who starts on third base and thinks he hit a triple but also has to go back to first base because it is too inconvenient for his arguments to start on third.

• West’s book suffers from a peculiar phenomenon that I’ve observed over the years in American academia, especially in urban studies. West is Brit, who has spent most of his career in American academia. This is the phenomenon of ‘if it wasn’t thought of at an American university or research institute, then it doesn’t exist and/or count.” There is something oddly arrogant about this phenomenon that I do not understand. I think it has something to do with first-world problems and being a member of the Top 1% of the world’s population. To be fair, the Congress for New Urbanism also seems to suffer from this particular problem (i.e., tunnel vision limited to the USA) even though it is primarily a professional organization. Someone should do some a research study.

• What is even more damning, given West’s bibliography on cities, is that it defies belief that he did not come across the work of Christopher Alexander and his associates at the University of California-Berkeley. West studiously avoids mentioning Alexander and the reasons will be obvious to most urban researchers. Manifestly, West’s ideas about cities are a biological analogy. It is in the title and again, an idea that has been around for a long time in architectural and urban studies. What this means is West’s ideas about cities come pre-refuted some 40 years earlier courtesy of Alexander’s most famous maxim: a city is not a tree. West has to avoid Alexander because his hierarchical network ideas implicitly – and falsely – argue the opposite. In this, West manages to misunderstand both cities and trees. Think of it this way: a heavy rain falls on a tree canopy and the water lands on one leaf on a higher branch but drips down from that leaf to another one on a lower branch crossing below. In West’s world, this cross-branching capability is irrelevant: trees are perfectly hierarchical systems without any overlap like the human circulatory system… as far as I’m aware capillaries do not cross-branch to share blood flow. This cross-branching capability is precisely what streets achieve in cities by connecting people and places. BTW, I might be open to the argument that a city is a scrub in terms of morphology though it is an analogy that strikes me – and probably many others – as insufficiently grandiose for the dynamic nature of cities.

• West also makes the classic sociologist’s mistake of thinking the only type of social interactions that matter is those involving some kind of high-level transaction. However, most interaction in cities are low-level, non-verbal, and do not necessarily involve a measurable transaction (other than the measurement of co-presence itself) but only the potential for a transaction. Again, try thinking of it this way. It is commonly said that 80% of communication is body language so, in a city, the overwhelming majority of social interactions represent informational potentials: Scenario: “She’s pretty and l like the way she dresses, I wonder if I should trying chatting her up here on the street.” This is a non-verbal social interaction based on the potential of co-presence where the only transaction is information: what she looks like, what she is wearing, assessment of what you are wearing, what part of town are you in, what kind of people frequent that area, and so on. Option 1: You do talk to her, you date, get married, and have kids where there are now lots of measurable high-level transactions. Option 2: You chicken out, don’t talk to her and go home. There are no subsequent transactions unless you run into her again, i.e., the potential value of co-presence. West scaling theory views these potentials as irrelevant. They can be measured but West does not bother with quantitative observations. I would argue this is the very stuff of cities that makes them so dynamic and wonderfully fascinating as physical objects and, as West correctly argues, complex adaptive systems.

• It is hard to believe that West’s Scale was properly refereed. A good referee would have advised him to cut the chapters on cities and companies to focus his arguments on biological systems, which seem stronger. West admits his knowledge of cities and companies is limited. He then spends almost 200 pages demonstrating how naive is his understanding of both. When it comes to organizational structures, it seems that West has never been involved in a small business venture nor oddly bothered to read Emile Durkheim, whose ideas on organic and mechanical solidarities would have been immensely valuable to better understand the social nature of companies.

• West admits his dataset on companies is biased toward publicly-traded companies on Wall Street. Yet he presents his findings as if they are universal to the organizational structure and life of all companies. If West had taken his findings of companies to their logical conclusion, then the bias of his data sample would have been apparent because the key takeaways would be: 1) emphasize short-term profit when young; and, 2) merge into oligarchic corporations with increased age. This is the data tail wagging the theoretical dog.

• In the same way, West does not take his biological analogy for cities to its logical conclusion either, This is because it would lead to the inevitable conclusion that the hierarchical manner in which we (especially in the USA) have been constructing suburban sprawl over the past half-century is the correct strategy, according to urban scaling theory. West does not mention it because he seems clearly aware that this would be an ill-advised conclusion given the advance of New Urbanism over the last three decades, which does get a brief mention. However, in even making this urban scaling theory argument about cities, West is assisting in perpetuating the dominant Modernist planning paradigm of the last century. This takes Scale into dangerously treacherous waters. Not mentioning it is not a strategy. It is avoiding the theoretical problems.

• Much of Scale comes across as cribbed from a series of TEDx lectures. There is nothing wrong with this approach as long as you are willing to do the work of editing the material into a coherent argument. Neither West nor the Penguin Books editors seemed willing to do so. West repeats the same argument with the exact same phrasing multiple things in the book, especially during its first half. I stopped counting after this occurred six times but it happens repeatedly and becomes increasingly irritating each instance.

• More than this, West is a mediocre writer. He continuously throws asides at the reader that come across as magician’s misdirection, i.e., look here while the trick goes on over there. He drops names, their CVs and awards, and grant funding like we are attending a Santa Fe cocktail party instead of reading a serious book. Too often, Scale comes across like West is trying to justify his tenure as the President of the Santa Fe Institute based on who he met instead of making a scientific argument based on what he knows. The overall effect comes across as arrogant, elitist and, in some instances, intellectually dishonest.

Proceed with caution and let the reader beware.

Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies
by Geoffrey West
Paperback, English, 496 pages
Penguin Press, 2017
ISBN-10: 1594205582
ISBN-13: 978-1594205583

You can purchase Scale by Geoffrey West on Amazon here.

Share the knowledge!
Share

Planning Naked | December 2015

Planning Naked | December 2015
by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A, The Outlaw Urbanist contributor

This issue of Planning Naked may be a little shorter than usual since my print edition of Planning Magazine hasn’t appeared in the mail in months (you might have noticed the gap in posts of Planning Naked). Is it an APA conspiracy to mute criticism of Planning Magazine by the Outlaw Urbanist? Probably not, I’m dealing with address change issues and APA is an organization that moves at a glacial pace when to comes to change. So I’m reading the digital edition of Planning Magazine, which is a pain in the a… my fingers and eyes, to say the least.

10 Strategies for Livable Communities (page 24) as part of the Livability for All article (page 21-24)
This article follows up on AARP’s creation of a Livability Index for senior citizens. You may recall from a previous edition of Planning Naked that I pointed out one of the worst ‘suburban sprawl hell’ areas of Jacksonville, Florida scored a 50 on AARP’s Livability Index, suggesting the criteria was suspect at best. What is really startling about these ’10 Strategies” is the utter lack of the word ‘design’ appearing anywhere in the list. More so, it’s difficult to find anything that could be even implied to mean design as an component of livability. Indeed, most of these strategies involve ‘consultation’ and ‘competitiveness’ (i.e. economic aka making money). Just as Carly Fiorina chides Hillary Clinton by saying “flying is a activity, not an accomplishment” so APA needs to be criticized in a similar manner. Consultation is an activity (a means to an end) and not an accomplishment in itself. Personally, I’m sick of APA members citing all manner of acronym-ed organizations they have consulted as if this was an accomplishment in itself. It is not. Poor Richard:  It isn’t the quantity of the acronyms that matter but the quality of their (letter) characters. APA members need to be careful about flying to something shiny (AARP’s Livability Index, e.g. Won’t someone please think of the old people?!?!) and applying it without thought before understanding its underlying assumptions. Count me suspicious. Based on experience, WalkScore, at the moment, seems like a more credible index than AARP’s Livability Index. Besides, AARP is composed of almost nothing but Baby Boomers these days and it’s the Baby Boomers who got us, for the most part, into this mess. Should we really trust the Baby Boomers’ interpretation of ‘livability’.

China’s Evolving Art Industry (page 35-40)
Has anyone else noticed that the most interesting and exciting developments in practice covered in Planning Magazine tend to occur in overseas countries? Does anyone think this is decidedly odd? Are Americans just not really trying when it comes to planning? Very interesting article on the emergence of creative districts in China over the last 30 years. However, the article betrays a fear of change (“commercial success prices out the pioneers”). Change is the very nature of the city. Get over it, already.

Yikes, There’s a Tourist in Town (page 41-42)
Short translation of this article for you: Planning would be so much easier if cities didn’t have people. We wouldn’t need any planning at all, or cities for that matter.

Best Practices: Using Planning Data Wisely (page 43-44)
This is a very good article by Terry Moore, Alexandra Reese and Ali Danko from ECON Northwest about the proper use of data in developing sound planning policy and regulations. The only thing that needs to be added to their list of bullet points is:

Transparency: Be clear and honest about data sources and your assumptions about that data and its collection.

I thoroughly recommend this article for everyone.

Research You Can Use: A physicist tries to solve the city by Reid Ewing (page 47-48)
I can’t tell you how refreshing it was to read Reid Ewing’s “Research You Can Use” article in this month’s issue of Planning Magazine. In it, Ewing explains why he rejected a submitted paper for a referred journal attempting to build upon Luis Bettencourt and Geoffrey West’s Urban Scaling Theory. I can’t really comment with authority on the validity of Ewing’s arguments since I have not read the submitted paper in question. Of course, Ewing is correct that the larger the city, the more you have of everything including crime. The aggregated population v. crime correlation is interesting at an abstract level (and should be totally expected) but not very useful for planning policy. For that, you need the sensitive street-by-street and block-by-block modeling techniques of the urban network such as space syntax. In this way, you can demonstrate the usefulness of such correlations between population, crime, location/access, and spatial vulnerability and potential proposed design changes to address the problem. There’s a lot of good research on that front. However, what is refreshing about Ewing’s article is the transparency. It is an excellent attempt to ‘unveil’ the scientific process at work. In this sense, it is very valuable. In fact, Ewing’s article makes me wonder whether there is some inherent value in all referred publications printing short summaries by referees for all rejected papers so that the entire scientific, urban planning community can benefit from seeing the process at work. Something worth thinking about as this could be ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’ type of strategy.

Planners Library
Sounds like there are several, new books worth reading:

John Nolen, Landscape Architect and City Planner by R. Bruce Stephenson. Available on Amazon here.

Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis Hardcover by Robert D. Putnam. Available on Amazon here.

The End of Automobile Dependence: How Cities are Moving Beyond Car-Based Planning by Peter Newman and Jeffrey Kenworthy. Available on Amazon here.

I want all three books for Christmas, please. Thank you!

Viewpoint: Planning’s Role in Social Justice by Grant Prior (page 56)
Have you ever noticed how often commentaries about ‘social justice’ are really nothing more than passionate calls for navel gazing? Justice is supposed to be blind so the concept of social justice is, in itself, an oxymoron. Mic drop.

Planning Naked is a regular feature with observations and comments about a recent issue of Planning: The Magazine of the American Planning Association.

Share the knowledge!
Share

TOP POST 2014 | VIEWPOINT | Theory Makes Perfect

“VIEWPOINT: Theory Makes Perfect”, was the most read post of the 2014 on The Outlaw Urbanist. We would have never guessed. The Outlaw Urbanist had visitors from 101 countries around the world with the most coming in order from: the United States, followed closely by the United Kingdom and Israel; the last being something of a surprise.

“Good theory leads to good planning. Normative theory – without quantitative observation and validation using scientific method – is nothing more than subjective opinion masquerading as theoretical conjecture.”

Viewpoint | Theory Makes Perfect
By Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A, The Outlaw Urbanist contributor

Regularly brandishing the bogeyman of Modernism, the architects of CIAM, and their industrial age vernacular to deride scientific method and endorse normative theory is a late-20th century practice du jour of the planning profession and education. It is a lot like suggesting a rape victim needs to marry her attacker to get over the experience. A shocking metaphor? Perhaps, but it is not a casual choice.

Early 20th century Modernist planning was a normative theory that aspired to science in its assertions. However, Modernism fails even the most basic tenets of being science. It was long on observation and way short on testing theoretical conjectures arising from those observations. Without scientific method to test its conjectures, Modernism in its infancy never made the crucial leap from normative to analytical theory. Instead, the subjective opinions of the CIAM architects and planners were embraced – sometimes blindly – by several generations of professionals in architecture and planning, and put into practice in hundreds of towns and cities. Today, for the most part, Modernism has finally been tested to destruction by our real world experience of its detrimental effects, though we continue to suffer from its remnants in the institutionalized dogma of planning education and the profession. Nonetheless, it has – at long last – made the transformation from normative to analytical theory and validated as a near-complete failure; at least in terms of town planning.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City (1934-35) (Image: Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation).

Modernism is a failure of normative theory, not scientific method. Ever since Robert Venturi published his twin polemics Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture/Learning from Las Vegas, it has been chic to assert that Modernism  – and by implication, science – was responsible for the rape of our cities during the 20th century. A direct line can be drawn from the proliferation of late-20th/early-21st century suburban sprawl to Frank Lloyd’s Wright Broadacre City, and even further back to its infancy in Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City. However, like a DNA test freeing a falsely accused rapist, scientific method reveals the true culprit is, in fact, normative theory. The 20th century is a wasteland littered with normative theories: modernism, futurism, post-modernism, deconstructivism, traditionalism, neo-suburbanism and many more ‘-isms’ than we can enumerate.  After the experience of the 20th century, it seems absurd to suggest we require more theoretical conjecture without scientific validation, more opinion and subjective observation – that is, less science – if we want to better understand the “organized complexity of our cities” (Jacobs, 1961). Sometimes it seems as if the planning profession and education has an adverse, knee-jerk reaction to anything it does not understand as “too theoretical”. Of course, the key to this sentence is not that it is “too theoretical” but rather that so many do “not understand” the proper role of science and theory in architecture and planning, in particular, and society, in general.

Science aspires to fact, not truth. The confusion about science is endemic to our society. You can witness it every time an atheist claims the non-existence of God on the basis of science. However, science does not aspire to truth. Not only is ‘Does God exist?’ unanswerable, it is a question any good scientist would never seek to answer in scientific terms. It is a question of faith. The value judgment we place on scientific fact does not derive from the science itself. It derives from the social, religious or cultural prism through which we view it. Right or wrong is the purview of politicians, philosophers and theologians. There are plenty – perhaps too many – planners and architects analogous to politicians, philosophers and theologians and not enough of the scientific variety. And too often, those that aspire to science remain mired in the trap of normative theory and institutionalized dogma. The Modernist hangover lingers in our approach to theory. But we require less subjective faith in our conjectures and more objective facts to test them. We persist with models that are colossal failures. When we are stuck in traffic, we feel like rats trapped in a maze. We apply normative theory to how we plan our transportation networks and fail to test the underlining conjecture. The robust power of GIS to store and organize vast amounts of information into graphical databases is touted as transforming the planning profession. But those that don’t understand science, mistake a tool of scientific method for theory. We project population years and decades into the future, yet fail to return to these projections to test and expose their (in)validity, refine the statistical method and increase the accuracy of future projections. And we hide the scientific failings of our profession behind the mantra, “it’s the standard.”

Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1898).

We require analytical theory and objective knowledge. If the facts do not support our conjectures, then they need to be discarded. In normative theory, ideas are precious. In analytical theory, they are disposable in favor of a better conjecture on the way to a scientific proof. Scientific method is the means to test and validate or dispose of theory. Our profession and communities have paid a terrible price for the deployment of normative theory. However, quantitative observation and analysis of its failings has offered enlightenment about how to proceed confidently into the future.  The work of notable researchers in Europe and the United States are leading the profession towards an analytical theory of the city. Even now, we will be able to deploy scientific method to derive better theory about the physical, social, economic and cultural attributes of the city. This leap forward will eventually propel planning out of the voodoo orbit of the social sciences and into the objective knowledge of true science. Until then, we need to focus a bit more on getting there and less time raising the SPECTRE of dead bogeymen to endorse the creation of entirely new ones.

PoorRichardv2_FrCoverPurchase your copy of Poor Richard, Another Almanac for Architects and Planners (Volume 2) today!

Available in print from Amazon, CreateSpace, and other online retailers.

Available on iBooks from the Apple iTunes Store and Kindle in the Kindle Store.

 

Share the knowledge!
Share

On Space | …and Time | Mark David Major

The past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities.”
– Stephen Hawking

Um… that’s what I said.
NOTE This post is not about architecture or urbanism. It is about space in a tangential, generic way in terms of space-time. I do not have the scientific or mathematical skills to either prove or disapprove the hypothesis discussed in this post. It is likely some physicist much smarter than myself has already contemplated this idea and applied the mathematics to discount the idea. It is also possible I am discussing something already accepted in the scientific community (i.e. reinventing the wheel, see the Stephen Hawking quote above). In fact, variations about this idea have existed for decades in the realm of science fiction/fantasy though I cannot recall a previous articulation in the exact manner of this post. However, this idea came to me in a rush during one morning over coffee and so fired my imagination that I had to write some notes so I did not forget it. This post is an expansion on those notes. There is a small possibility that this idea is entirely new. If so, I leave it to (much smarter and capable) physicists to explore the mathematics and validity of the idea. I only ask for some credit in providing the spark to their ideas. I have attempted to represent the premise of this post in the diagram below. I am coming at this concept of time from the point of view of a historian, writer, and dreamer.

Diagram illustrating the relationship between entropy and probability in space-time from past to present to future (Credit: Mark David Major).

On the Constant Present and Variable Future Past
– Past Imperfect and Imprecise Future
by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A

Time is a universal constant, according to my understanding of the science. By universal constant, it means that time flows at a constant rate much like the speed of light is 186,282 miles/sec everywhere in the universe. Of course, the exception is if one travels at or near the speed of light, then time slows down for the traveler while time flows at its constant rate for the non-traveler based on Einstein’s theory of relativity. This is not a deterrent to the ideas in this post. For example, my understanding is Newton’s universal laws do not apply at the quantum level of our universe yet they are still applicable as scientific laws.

The premise of the ‘multiverse’ has gained greater acceptance in the scientific community over the last three decades. In the realm of science fiction, this idea has been around much longer; more than a century if we consider H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) as the starting point. In terms of time, the concept of the multiverse imagines that every scenario of events/actions in nature (including those specifically human) are played out across an infinite number of dimensions (perhaps portrayed most famously in Star Trek beginning in the 1967 episodes “Mirror, Mirror” and “The City on the Edge of Forever”, which used this premise for dramatic purposes). In terms of the flow of time, this can be imagined as a ‘time tree’ whereby an infinite series of lines branch off at various points in the past to run parallel with our own time line, like the branches of a tree where the root of the trunk is the Big Bang and the dimensions of ‘multiverse’ diverge from this earliest point in time. You can also refer to Doc Brown’s simplistic chalk board drawing and explanation to Marty in Back to the Future II). It is a tantalizing concept. However, Einstein’s theories tell us that time travel is not possible; or, at least, it is accepted that time travel to the past is not possible (the future, maybe, according to some physicists). The usual shorthand for this is the ‘grandfather paradox’, which is if I travel to the past and kill my grandfather then I never existed to travel to the past and kill my grandfather, i.e. a temporal paradox.

But what if this premise of time is inaccurate? What are the implications if we invert our ‘time tree’ and anchor the root to the present? The future and the past become “a spectrum of possibilities” (or probabilities) whereby the past converges on the present and diverges into the future. In this sense, time flows at a constant rate but is fluid. NOTE: After later reading an article about time by a philosopher of science in England, we can add the concept of entropy to this picture; namely, entropy is only stable in the present and becomes increasingly unstable in both the past and the future (6 September 2017 revision).

This means the past, present and future are always changing based on the probability of small moments (decisions, actions, events) across time, and time itself is overlapping waves of probabilities anchored to the present. We do not perceive this because we are always trapped in this particular point of time-space that we call the present. We could only observe the fluctuating waves of time and history if we could simultaneously exist in the present and ‘outside’ of that point in time; in the same manner that Einstein explained the theory of relativity from the point of view of the observer and the observed traveling at the speed of light.

The past only ‘appears’ fixed to us but the probabilities of the past (some probable, others unlikely) are always altering our perception of the present, just as we do the same for an infinite number of probable futures. For example, according to the Wikipedia entry on the Holocaust, the Nazis exterminated approximately 11 million (nearly 7.25 million Jews) between 1941 and 1945. Note: This example is not intended to be controversial but merely illustrative in gross, easily understood terms. I understand this Wikipedia said the same thing yesterday and believe it will say the same tomorrow but only because I am anchored in the present, which defines my perception of yesterday and tomorrow. But if the past is a series of probabilities constantly changing the present, then it is possible this Wikipedia entry stated yesterday/tomorrow it was/is 10 million or 12 million. The lowest probability outcome would be that the Wikipedia entry will state/did stated tomorrow/yesterday that the Nazis exterminated the entire Jewish race or the Nazis didn’t exterminate anyone (or even existed). Without being able to observe time from outside its flow, I can never be certain.

Our actions in the past, present, and future continually shape history within an infinite set of probabilities measuring from unlikely (-) to likely (+). At the same time, time tends to converge on the highest probabilities in giving shape to the present, just as our actions in the present (in small ways at this specific point in time) give shape to the probable outcomes of the future. This is free will as measured in our actions; past, present, and future in giving shape to what was, what is, and what will be. However, there is also a balance to time in the universe as it tends to converge on the highest probabilities. This is not predestination but what we could term ‘pre-probabilistic’. In nature, it takes a dramatic event to change the probabilities; for example, the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) extinction event caused by an asteroid impact that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. In human history, altering the probabilities is more easily achieved (if that is the right word) at the level of the collective; for example the Black Death pandemic from 1346–53 that killed somewhere between 75 and 200 million people in Europe. It takes a rare individual to alter the probabilities of history. For example, Alexander the Great directly gave rise to the Hellenistic Period. It is probable that the influence of Greek culture on the Roman Republic/Empire (and later on European and American models of representative government) still would have occurred but, absence Alexander’s ambitions for conquest, Philip I of Macedon or some other’s Greek’s ambitions would have been limited to Greece itself/Greek cities of Asia Minor and Darius III’s Persian Empire probably does not fall, which trickles down to affect the probabilities that eventually converge on the present. In fact, based on this concept of time, such people (Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, and so forth) do not ‘fulfill’ their destiny but overcome their destiny to profoundly alter the probabilities of times. It seems likely this happens all the time on a smaller, imperceptible scale for some people.

This concept of time appears to ‘fit’ well with Einstein’s ideas that time travel is not possible. Perhaps, though, it would be more accurate to state that if you did time travel, you could never certain of arriving in the most probable past or future that defines the nature of your present. First, you would have to locate, observe and map the probabilities of the past and future from outside of time-space itself. This is as good as a definition of the omnipotent as any, i.e. God. Second, this would be mathematically impossible since the probabilities from every event/action in history would be infinite. Perhaps it would be feasible in some manner to ‘random sample’ the probabilities by first mapping the least probable extremes (Nazis never existed, Nazis conquered the world) and work towards the most probable (Nazis exterminated 10.9 or 11.1 million people during the Holocaust). However, even this is a daunting task because how could you determine and map the extremes of lowest probability in an infinite set? It cannot be done except in a partial, incomplete manner. At least, not without taking some mathematical shortcuts, i.e. cheats. This always brings you back to an uncertainty principle in time travel. You could never be certain of arriving in the right place or time because the only ‘anchor’ is the present.

There is something comforting in this concept of time because our actions do matter but, at the same time, time in the universe develops a ‘self-correcting’ mechanism based on the laws of entropy and probability whereby time tends to converge on those possibilities with the greatest likelihood. If I travel back in time and kill my grandfather, then my ‘grandmother’ marries my grandfather’s brother (greatest chance is my grandmother marries someone most similar to my grandfather). I still exist as a slightly modified version of myself derived from the same gene pool to travel back in time and kill my now-great uncle. We can change the future and the past is always changing us but only through tremendous efforts in altering the parameters in probability do we make certain outcomes more or less probable. It also means there is only one ‘now’ – carpe diem.

On Space is a regular series of philosophical posts from The Outlaw Urbanist. These short articles (usually about 500 words) are in draft form so ideas, suggestions, thoughts and constructive criticism are welcome.

Share the knowledge!
Share

VIEWPOINT | Theory Makes Perfect

“Good theory leads to good planning. Normative theory – without quantitative observation and validation using scientific method – is nothing more than subjective opinion masquerading as theoretical conjecture.”

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City (1934-35) (Image: Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation).

Viewpoint | Theory Makes Perfect
By Mark David Major, The Outlaw Urbanist contributor

Regularly brandishing the bogeyman of Modernism, the architects of CIAM, and their industrial age vernacular to deride scientific method and endorse normative theory is a late-20th century practice du jour of the planning profession and education. It is a lot like suggesting a rape victim needs to marry her attacker to get over the experience. A shocking metaphor? Perhaps, but it is not a casual choice.

Early 20th century Modernist planning was a normative theory that aspired to science in its assertions. However, Modernism fails even the most basic tenets of being science. It was long on observation and way short on testing theoretical conjectures arising from those observations. Without scientific method to test its conjectures, Modernism in its infancy never made the crucial leap from normative to analytical theory. Instead, the subjective opinions of the CIAM architects and planners were embraced – sometimes blindly – by several generations of professionals in architecture and planning, and put into practice in hundreds of towns and cities. Today, for the most part, Modernism has finally been tested to destruction by our real world experience of its detrimental effects, though we continue to suffer from its remnants in the institutionalized dogma of planning education and the profession. Nonetheless, it has – at long last – made the transformation from normative to analytical theory and validated as a near-complete failure; at least in terms of town planning.

Le Corbusier’s La Ville Radieuse (1930).

Modernism is a failure of normative theory, not scientific method. Ever since Robert Venturi published his twin polemics Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture/Learning from Las Vegas, it has been chic to assert that Modernism  – and by implication, science – was responsible for the rape of our cities during the 20th century. A direct line can be drawn from the proliferation of late-20th/early-21st century suburban sprawl to Frank Lloyd’s Wright Broadacre City, and even further back to its infancy in Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City. However, like a DNA test freeing a falsely accused rapist, scientific method reveals the true culprit is, in fact, normative theory. The 20th century is a wasteland littered with normative theories: modernism, futurism, post-modernism, deconstructivism, traditionalism, neo-suburbanism and many more ‘-isms’ than we can enumerate.  After the experience of the 20th century, it seems absurd to suggest we require more theoretical conjecture without scientific validation, more opinion and subjective observation – that is, less science – if we want to better understand the “organized complexity of our cities” (Jacobs, 1961). Sometimes it seems as if the planning profession and education has an adverse, knee-jerk reaction to anything it does not understand as “too theoretical”. Of course, the key to this sentence is not that it is “too theoretical” but rather that so many do “not understand” the proper role of science and theory in architecture and planning, in particular, and society, in general.

Science aspires to fact, not truth. The confusion about science is endemic to our society. You can witness it every time an atheist claims the non-existence of God on the basis of science. However, science does not aspire to truth. Not only is ‘Does God exist?’ unanswerable, it is a question any good scientist would never seek to answer in scientific terms. It is a question of faith. The value judgment we place on scientific fact does not derive from the science itself. It derives from the social, religious or cultural prism through which we view it. Right or wrong is the purview of politicians, philosophers and theologians. There are plenty – perhaps too many – planners and architects analogous to politicians, philosophers and theologians and not enough of the scientific variety. And too often, those that aspire to science remain mired in the trap of normative theory and institutionalized dogma. The Modernist hangover lingers in our approach to theory. But we require less subjective faith in our conjectures and more objective facts to test them. We persist with models that are colossal failures. When we are stuck in traffic, we feel like rats trapped in a maze. We apply normative theory to how we plan our transportation networks and fail to test the underlining conjecture. The robust power of GIS to store and organize vast amounts of information into graphical databases is touted as transforming the planning profession. But those that don’t understand science, mistake a tool of scientific method for theory. We project population years and decades into the future, yet fail to return to these projections to test and expose their (in)validity, refine the statistical method and increase the accuracy of future projections. And we hide the scientific failings of our profession behind the mantra, “it’s the standard.”

Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1898).

We require analytical theory and objective knowledge. If the facts do not support our conjectures, then they need to be discarded. In normative theory, ideas are precious. In analytical theory, they are disposable in favor of a better conjecture on the way to a scientific proof. Scientific method is the means to test and validate or dispose of theory. Our profession and communities have paid a terrible price for the deployment of normative theory. However, quantitative observation and analysis of its failings has offered enlightenment about how to proceed confidently into the future.  The work of notable researchers in Europe and the United States are leading the profession towards an analytical theory of the city. Even now, we will be able to deploy scientific method to derive better theory about the physical, social, economic and cultural attributes of the city. This leap forward will eventually propel planning out of the voodoo orbit of the social sciences and into the objective knowledge of true science. Until then, we need to focus a bit more on getting there and less time raising the SPECTRE of dead bogeymen to endorse the creation of entirely new ones.

Share the knowledge!
Share