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Are Cities Too Complicated?

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Re: Are Cities Too Complicated?

#41

Post by haimez »

tsunamifury wrote: post #6

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…

I think that this is more a natural observation about distributed systems that object orientation. Neither precludes the other, but the root of the problem is the inherent necessity and limitation that comes from distributing information and decision nodes, and less from leveraging hierarchy to "get shit done".

Re: Are Cities Too Complicated?

#42

Post by wcummings »

jomamaxx wrote: post #30
wcummings wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to seem mean, but you're like a caricature of a country person. People are living things which grow to suit their environment, everyone thinks their way is the best way and that their hometown is the coolest. When you say things like "city people care more about money" and "city people are mean" you sound like a bumpkin.

Maybe he's a caricature, but he's 100% right. I grew up going to school in the burbs, all summer in a small home-town - and have lived in several major cities. 'City people' are definitely more about the money. Small towns are communities. Everyone knows everyone - often for multiple generations. Families have ties - not just people. You can't 'not care about' someone you've known for 40 years, even if you don't know…

>your comment might be a kind of bigotry

The irony is so deep.

Re: Are Cities Too Complicated?

#43

Post by pdkl95 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #32
pdkl95 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> also has huge dependencies True, but they are different dependencies. One of the goals is to eliminate the risk of common-mode failure[1]. One failure that makes the internet inoperable also takes out everything that depended on it, which shouldn't be "everything". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_cause_and_special_cause...

> One failure that makes the internet inoperable also takes out everything that depended on it, which shouldn't be "everything". While the current structure may not reflect this (and, to the extent it doesn't, this is a problem), a central part of the idea of the internet is that it should be structured so that a single failure would at most make a minor part of the internet unusable, and perhaps cause a two-way part…

> a minor part of the internet

> a two-way partition

These are localized problems, not common-mode failures. I'm talking about a problem with something that takes out a significant portion of the internet. This isn't about a simple network partition; a common-mode failure is a problem in something that is common to an entire class of devices.

A totally contrived example might be a worm that bricks routers (we've seen a few router vulnerabilities recently) and spreads with the speed of the fastest worms. Good luck finding "usable parts" of the internet when a large part of the routing capability needs to be physically replaced and reconfigured. This risk has grown in the recent past with the centralization of many services.

Re: Are Cities Too Complicated?

#44

Post by jomamaxx »

TillE wrote: post #37
jomamaxx wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI I should say 'large cities' - especially North American ones. Please like Munich, Frankfurt feel pretty 'small town' relatively speaking. People tend to stay put a lot longer (like forever, even hundreds of years over generations), and the geography of those cities are completely different as well.

So really you're just talking about New York (which is absolutely a rat race nightmare) and some dysfunctional, badly planned American cities. Because I look at this: > 'City people' are definitely more about the money. And then I look at Berlin (3.5 million people!). And I just laugh.

No, I mean most American cities.

Berlin is not like Munich or Frankfurt - and does not fit the template of most other German cities. It's quite a bit bigger and spread out. That said - it's more like Frankfurt than it is LA. Also - 'Greater Berlin' is more than 5 million.

Also important to note: many European cities don't have 'suburbs'- what they have is 'city core' then 'dense surrounding'- which is not that much - but instead of suburbs, they have tons of 'surrounding towns'. It's really quite hard to describe.

Frankfurt - I could almost run across it in my daily run - and it has big skyscrapers. It has the busiest Airport in Europe!

Imagine taking all of Maine + Vermont - and instead of 30Km between each small township - make it 3km. So basically, you have tons of 'mini, distinct communities'.

Many of those 'mini communities' are 1000 years old type thing, and people are not very transient.

Within those communities - generally things are walkable, you have unique local restaurants, often high quality, artisans, small businesses, sometimes Universities.

Much of Europe - and to some extent Asia - is like this.

It's hard to describe but obvious when you see it.

It's the model I think we, in North America, should have used for urban planning - instead of the mega-city model.

Re: Are Cities Too Complicated?

#45

Post by jomamaxx »

wcummings wrote: post #42
jomamaxx wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe he's a caricature, but he's 100% right. I grew up going to school in the burbs, all summer in a small home-town - and have lived in several major cities. 'City people' are definitely more about the money. Small towns are communities. Everyone knows everyone - often for multiple generations. Families have ties - not just people. You can't 'not care about' someone you've known for 40 years, even if you don't know…

>your comment might be a kind of bigotry The irony is so deep.

">your comment might be a kind of bigotry The irony is so deep."

I was making generalizations about people that I think is true.

But I wasn't calling people names, or making them seem as though they are 'out of touch and stupid' because they are either from the city or a small town.

There are advantages and disadvantages of both - but city people are by far and away more 'individualist', in much the same way that 'Americans' are usually more individualist than say, Swedes. It's just a generalization, not bigotry.

Re: Are Cities Too Complicated?

#46

Post by endswapper »

mwsherman wrote: post #27

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.

Your point is a step in the right direction. Life is complex and diverse. Cities serve as models. Daily life is a test of the inputs and results. Every day they can be reconfigured and the data analyzed.

Re: Are Cities Too Complicated?

#47

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

pdkl95 wrote: post #13
tsunamifury wrote: post #6

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…

> If each one requires knowledge of the entire system The general problem is the growing number of dependencies. James Burke in "Connections" warned that civilization is an interconnected web of technology traps [1]. We survive as long as everything works (or "mostly" works), but there is a risk of cascade failure. More recently, Dan Geer warned[2] about the same type of problem: In the last couple of years, I've fou…

Indented text is replicated verbatim and intended for quoting code.

It's a pain in the left kidney to read on mobile.

Just use asterics around the text to italicise it to indicate it's take from elsewhere.

This has been a public service announcement.

Re: Are Cities Too Complicated?

#48

Post by lobf »

pdkl95 wrote: post #43
dragonwriter wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One failure that makes the internet inoperable also takes out everything that depended on it, which shouldn't be "everything". While the current structure may not reflect this (and, to the extent it doesn't, this is a problem), a central part of the idea of the internet is that it should be structured so that a single failure would at most make a minor part of the internet unusable, and perhaps cause a two-way part…

> a minor part of the internet > a two-way partition These are localized problems, not common-mode failures . I'm talking about a problem with something that takes out a significant portion of the internet. This isn't about a simple network partition; a common-mode failure is a problem in something that is common to an entire class of devices. A totally contrived example might be a worm that bricks routers (we've see…

What about a simpler idea, like sudden, widespread lack of electricity?

Re: Are Cities Too Complicated?

#49

Post by FrozenVoid »

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).

Re: Are Cities Too Complicated?

#50

Post by contingencies »

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

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