“Credentialing, not educating, has become the primary business of North American universities.” Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead
There is a common thread that runs through much contemporary writing and thinking about economies, organizations, and cities. From Jane Jacobs to, most recently, author, economist, former Dean of Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, Roger L. Martin.Roger Martin’s new book studies the system failures caused by applying machine-thinking solutions to complex adaptive system problems. His insights touch down in Nanaimo at almost every turn. Our City Hall is not a machine, our city is not a machine. https://t.co/UrO6CCFeOJ
— NanaimoCommons (@NanaimoCommons) April 12, 2021
Martin's new book When More is Not Better: Overcoming America’s Obsession With Efficiency, studies the system failures caused by applying machine-thinking solutions to complex-adaptive-system problems.
Jane Jacobs' arguably most important insight into the workings of the city appears in the last chapter of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It is that cities are systems of organized complexity. "The variables are many but are not helter-skelter; they are interrelated into an organic whole.”
Former Vancouver chief planner Brent Toderian in this 2015 Planetizen essay Better City-Making Means Breaking Down Silos—Here's How (to get a more holistic approach to city-building) recounts "the story of the NASA janitor being asked by President Kennedy what his job was, and the janitor giving the answer "I'm helping to put a man on the moon.””
The thread that runs through this thinking, is that human systems (the economy, the city) are adaptive systems like the life sciences. And that if we stubbornly persist in applying solutions to complex adaptive systems that would be appropriate only to machines, we will fail, often we will only compound our problems.
Organized complexity ("The variables are many but are not helter-skelter; they are interrelated into an organic whole.”) silo breaking ("I'm helping to put a man on the moon.” ) and the complex adaptive system ("theory-based approaches will produce deeply flawed outcomes") share an ethos. They counter, as architect and urban designer Ken Greenberg says, the neo-conservative ideological trend of recent decades, “beggar thy neighbour policies [that] inevitably lead to a race to the bottom and impoverishment of the public realm and public services."The Problems with Economic Efficiency https://t.co/DOlvvFG3oT
— The Economic Garden (@Economicgarden1) November 26, 2020
And here the point is made yet again by Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn in his blog post “Do You Want to Know What Works?
"Emphasis in the merely-complicated pattern is on growth... The complex pattern experiences growth but emphasis is on stability—how do we ensure that we’ll be here tomorrow, next year, a century from now?" Do You Want to Know What Works? @clmarohn https://t.co/KlmvHBFqgO pic.twitter.com/4Pjl6O3IN2
— The Economic Garden (@Economicgarden1) April 26, 2021
"Those administering the complicated pattern — the technical professionals — quickly become obsessed with growth and the inputs (capital) necessary to create accelerating levels of growth. They become trapped in what we’ve called the Growth Ponzi Scheme as liabilities mount over time. Those administering the complex pattern—a co-creation of citizens and humble professionals—obsess over feedback as a way to discern what they should do next. They are seeking stability through the continual harmonizing of many competing objectives, one of which is growth (though not the only one)." — Charles Marohn
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