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by Guy Berliner
Tuesday, Feb. 05, 2002 at 1:03 AM
Anarchist political thought can draw inspiration from and in turn inform aesthetics. Mathematician and urban studies scholar Nikos Salingaros reveals the common statistical properties between spontaneously emergent complex systems that are both functionally and aesthetically satisfying, but lacking from modern, top-down planned human systems.
error Take a look at the following. This stuff blows my mind: http://sphere.math.utsa.edu/sphere/salingar/urbanstructure.html
Basically, mathematician and urban studies scholar Nikos Salingaros has drawn the outlines of a mathematical study of human ecology, starting principally with urban planning (but the applications extend well beyond, as he hints in various places).
The basic impression I get from what he is saying is that, as the power and resources at the disposal of centralized corporate and government bureaucracies grows, so, too, does their ability to impose top-down designs that, for whatever aesthetic or useful purposes they may be intended to fulfill in the minds of the planners, systematically violate the design patterns that arise and are inherent in any spontaneously emergent complex natural system (e.g., a human urban environment predating modern planning).
He presents a strong case that there are certain very regular properties, analogous to those found in fractal geometries, that characterize natural systems. One of them is "self-similarity" over a large range of scales. To put things simply, in natural and spontaneously emergent complex systems, the relative numbers of objects at any particular scale are in some constant inverse proportion to the area they take up. He states this as the "hyperbolic multiplicity rule," px^m = C, where p is the relative number of objects of a particular scale, and x is the scale (say, for instance, a width in feet), and m is the "dimension" (a number usually between 1 and 2).
These abstract mathematical patterns are objectively related to aesthetics. Human beings find their surroundings less interesting and engaging when their properties deviate excessively from these patterns. This is easy to see in the extreme cases, for example: a uniform distribution of massive, featureless objects produces monotony (outsized px^m), whereas a distribution of objects totally random over all scales produces an impression of chaos. These impressions are in turn produced by definite properties of human cognition. To quote Salinngaros:
"Scales play a major, even if subconscious, role in design because they facilitate the process of human cognition. The mind of the observer groups similar objects of the same size into a single level of scale. This process, which has been compared with digital image compression in computers, reduces the amount of information presented to the observer by a complex structure. The mind apparently also estimates the number of similar objects on each scale, i.e., their relative multiplicity, and compares these numbers to what it knows regarding complexity from naturally occurring structures. If the distribution of scales and the relative multiplicity of elements correspond to an experientially generated internal standard, we perceive the structure as coherent."
Contrary to the complaint often voiced by well-intentioned people, it makes me think that "planning" as such is more the problem than the solution. It would be all too easy for any well intentioned planner to try to optimize a network for some particular utilitarian property, such as distance from any particular service (or, as is so often the case, speed and volume of auto traffic, for instance), only to produce a network that was highly dysfunctional for other reasons. When many people spontaneously organize themselves into cities, they build settlements in patterns that simultaneously balance a large number of factors. When large corporations or governments build settlements for them, the results are bound to produce terrible pathologies which would never occur naturally. If we are stuck for now with such institutions, perhaps the best we can do is to at least avoid the worst sorts of mistakes, such as the violent disfiguration of "geometrical fundamentalism" imposed by modernist urban planning (see, for example, http://www.plannet.com/features/geometricalfundamentalism.html).
sphere.math.utsa.edu/sphere/salingar/urbanstructure.html
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by interesting
Tuesday, Feb. 05, 2002 at 1:50 PM
see above
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