Marginal Structure |

My two passions have always been the quantitative study of social dynamics, and community. How can we detect and understand patterns in human social interactions? What does that say about their role in, or relationship to, natural properties of the universe? If we can use observed patterns in human dynamics to reverse engineer properties of nature they manifest, can we turn around and use those properties to design social institutions and collaborative frameworks?

The study of human social dynamics has always been something I wanted to apply to what, in my mind, I called “human settlements.” I guess this comes from my long history in the space community. “Human settlements” is an archetypal way of discussing society, in a way that makes few assumptions about our current systems. One of the best qualities of the space community is that we use the potential implicit in the far future, combined with the possibility of entirely new places, as a vehicle to think about concepts or problems in new ways.

That said, “human settlements” have become something that lives only in that far future. I realized I’ve been thinking about human settlements in terms of theory, not practice. This frees me up to think big, but saves me from ever getting to work!

Although we’re often told to let go and dream big, sometimes you realize that dreaming is the easy part– made easier when you delegate those dreams to the hypothetical, or to a future far enough away that we have little responsibility to it, save for inspiration. The hard part is taking those dreams down from the pedestal and tearing them open to implementation, revision, error, and the daily grind.

A few weeks ago, I was back in my hometown of Toronto, feeling inspired and excited by the various open city initiatives underway. And I had this delightful aha-moment where I came down from space and the distant future, long enough to realize the rather obvious fact that cities are human settlements.

Cities are the embodiment of the potential we research when we study social dynamics. They are vehicles for the emergence of self-organization amongst individuals. As and when cities get abstracted away from the purely physical, they are still the anchors and models of our experience, and the primary metaphor we have for “human settlements” on this and other planets.

Thinking through this lens has also helped me understand why the dynamics of direct human interaction are more interesting than the application of these same questions to federal-level policy or international affairs. It’s because this is where the rubber hits the road. These direct links are the tenuous sparks of coherence in what, nature tells us, will be an iterative and evolutionary process towards new ways of living. We can bound or guide it all we want by applying policies at a societal or institutional level. But, at those larger scales, the atomic units of interaction are groups of people, the internal dynamics of which are black boxes. Without better models of the natural forces at work inside those black boxes, our large scale guidance will be coarse at best, and wrong or destructive at worst.

Cities will also affect and give shape to the actions of a record number (and percentage) of people around the world in the coming decades. It is thus an unparalleled opportunity to leverage these dynamics to facilitate creativity and progress.