entropy

I’ve recently become pretty obsessed with WNYC’s radiolab. Hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich discuss pop-science and explore a really diverse range of questions from “why does music make us feel?” to “what happens in the brain when we have feelings of love?”

I can work and learn at the same time? Score.

Recently I was listening to one called “Emergence,” about questions of why and how life forms come to be organized. Why do we have society? How is it that this world, with all of its diversity and temporality and all of us walking around with our separate individualities, can ever become ordered into groups and societies with rulers? How do ants, with seemingly very limited individual brainpower become organized enough to produce colonies? How is it that all of our neurons ever come to work together to produce a single thought? Where does this organization emerge from with seemingly no single leader?

These are interesting questions that touch on nearly all levels of organization - from those colonies of ants to the ways in which cities and neighborhoods become organized over the years into having districts and locales through human interaction. Jad and Robert begin–once they start talking about the human mind and its incomprehensible ability with all of its random neural circuitry to have a single, attentive thought–to touch on some pretty spooky, ghost-in-the-machine sort of territory.

But the question of human organization on the broader city level is a complex one. On the one hand, cities are planned to a degree - some more than others. This plan seeks to provide a form of coherence - districts zoned to meet certain needs or to provide for certain patterns of consumption. But on another level cities are comprised of living beings - and over time take on organization in a much more random way: through encounters and chance. In “Emergence” Jad and Robert give the example of the flower district on 28th street in manhattan. This was never zoned to be the place in the city to get flowers, but over time, as one flower dealer set up shop and another saw that perhaps if he moved in across the street he could draw customers from the first shop, and another and another - now there is a street in Manhattan with hundreds of flower shops selling as many flowers and potted plants as one could imagine. Cities are lived in and formed by the encounters and ventures of its inhabitants. And there is no overarching structure or plan for such chance.

Which brings me to another interesting tidbit - a new book by Antoine J. Bosquet (Author) and Michael J. Dwyer (Contributor), “The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity” in which Bosquet and Dwyer discuss the feral urban lanscape within the context of modern methods of political and military control.

See also - “Information Landscapes and the Feral City” on Ubiwar

-”Feral Cities” on BldgBlog

-CTLab