{"article":{"id":14688,"heading":"mathematical foundations of anarchist aesthetics","author":"Guy Berliner","created":"2002-02-05 09:03:41","modified":"2005-08-15 00:53:26","last_modified":"Mon, 15 Aug 2005 07:53:26","article":"
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).
\n","contact":"","link":"http:\/\/sphere.math.utsa.edu\/sphere\/salingar\/urbanstructure.html","address":"","phone":"","parent_id":0,"mime_type":"text\/plain","summary":"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.","numcomment":1,"fileurl":"\/uploads\/2002\/02\/mathematic.txt","filesize":"4.0 kibibytes","article_url":"\/news\/2002\/02\/14688.php"},"attachments":[],"comments":[{"id":14702,"heading":"thanks","article":"see above","author":"interesting","parent_id":14688,"mime_type":"text\/plain","created":"2002-02-05 21:50:10","modified":"2002-02-05 22:12:54","fileurl":""}]}