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City out of Chaos

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The Sustainable World
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City out of Chaos
Urban Self-organization and Sustainability

Riccardo M. Pulselli & Enzo Tiezzi


University of Siena, Italy

W 1TPRESS Southampton, Boston


Riceardo Pulsellf & Enzo T i d
Universifyof Siena, Italy

Cover: View of Colle Val D'Elsa (detail) by Giotgio Pulselli from the series "All'Ombra
di Arnolfo" 2007 (private collection of E m Tiezzi and Nadia Marchettini).

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ISBN: 978-1-84564-133-7
ISSN:1476-9581
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2008935798
No responsibility is assumed by the Publisher, the Editors and Authons for any injury
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otherwise, or from any use or o p t i o n of any methods, products, instructions or ideas
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O WIT Press 2009
Printad in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
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system,or transmittedin any fonn or by any means, electronic, msckanical,photocopying,
tecording, or orherwise,without the prior wri.tten petmission of fhe Publisher.
Contents
Foreword
Prologue
1 Entropy and time
The city immersed in time
From a space to a time culture
Entropy and the arrow of time
Dissipative structures
2 Space and time
Idrisi
Energy guzzling, dissipative cities
Two speeds of technology and nature
A map of time
3 Order out of chaos
Oscillating reactions
How organization comes out of chaos
From cells to tropical storms
Climate
4 Networks
Suspended cities
The web of life
Return to the Aristotelian city
Regional systems and networks
Time is real and space is relative?
5 Flows and stocks
Lymph
A model of flows from source to sink
Withdrawal of resources
Scheme of a city
6 Good government
The effects of good government
Measuring flows: Odum's emergy
The energy hierarchy
The urban region
Cities and the geography of flows: the case of Siena
Another emergy landscape: the case of Cagliari
7 Mobile geographies
Eye traces
The invisible sphere
Organizational units
Urban landscape ecology
Telecommunications and mobile geographies
Study of a vast area: the case of Pescara and adjacent
Adriatic coast
Study of a metropolitan area: the case of Milan
The art of cartography
8 Indeterminacy
Escher's stairs
The cube
Emergence of novelty
More flexible tools
9 Chaos and design
MAXXI
A new system of measurement for architecture
Conservation and restoration
Green architecture and town planning
Raw earth
Aesthetics of complexity
Epilogue
A prosperous view
Acknowledgments
Index
Foreword

Vitntvius tells of the architect, Deinocrates, who desired audience


before Alexander the Great and came with letters of recommendation
to impress the emperor's officials.Tired of the long wait, he attracted
Alexander's attention by appearing completely naked, smeared with
0 5 a lion skin over his left shoulder, a club in his right hand. Received
by the emperor, he outlined his proposal to carve Mount Athos into
the statue of a man and to build a city in the left hand of the statue.
The right hand would hold a basin into which all the streams of the
mountain would flow, thence cascading into the sea.
Alexander rejected the proposal with the following words: 'Just as a
baby cannot be fed and grow without the nurse's milk, a city without
cornfields and their produce cannot develop or grow populous.'
Nothing new under the sun. Architects continue to make bombastic
proposals to those in power and acquire credit through the mass media.
They continue to consider cities as islands divorced from the surrounding
countryside.
One of the great merits of this book is that it demonstrates M y and
persuasively that this autonomy does not exist,not even in the age of the
global economy, and that recent advances of science provide insights
into the complexity of the problems besetting our cities and tools to
solve them.
A striking section of the book describes the ewlogml JGotpnnt, an
indicator that shows the tragic contrast between accelerating consumption
and the slow natural regeneration of resources. WiIliam Rees and Mathis
Wackemagel introduced this method of environmental accounting in the
1990s. It compares the needs of a population with the area of teme&d
ecosyskms quired to s a w them, obtaining a measure of velacity.
Applying the indicator to the annual cycles of the planet, Wackemagel
PrOclaimed 6 October 2007 as 'ecologrcal debt day,' because his calculations
showed that on that day humans had already c o d the yeafs
rescutre~and begun to erode non-renewable reserves, behaving more or
less like the grasshopper in La Fontaine's fable.It is easy to see that thisday
will come earlier each year if nothing is done, and wiU soon symbolically
mark the begmmngof autumn.
This indicator dramatically recalls the second principle of
thermodynamics that introduced the concept of entropy as a n index
of the degradationof physical systems; reversible isothermal variations in
entropy are equal to the heat absorbed by the system divided by its
absolute temperature. A superficial interpretation of entropy suggests an
inexorable process of impoverishment or leveling that evokes pessimism
and fatalism: Qausius's thermal death. Taking up the ideas of Prigogine
without a trace of pessimism and fatalism, the authors correct this
supedmal view. Biological evolution demonstrates that biological
systems develop in a direction opposite to that of thermal death, far from
equilibrium, without contradicting thermodynamics. At equilibrium,
matter seems blind and insensitive, whereas far from equilibrium it
acquires the mysterious capacity of self-organization Chaos and order
are seen as being in constructivecontradictionrather than in opposition
Here lies the message of hope contained in this book. A physical
chemist and an architect reflect on the present and future of cities, with
their problems of overcrowding, infrastructural obsolescence, traffic,
pollution, wastes, and conununity breakdown. In a change of method
and instrwnents offered by the new scientific paradigm, they identify a
path that could invert some of the processes threatening the human
future.
The authors are not falsely optimistic about a happy outsome, nor
are they deceived into blind acceptance of the current values created
by the transformation of our cities. The concept of self-organization of
matter does not exempt humans from studying the processes that
regard them, assessing impact and significance and making decisions.
Chaos, its potential revealed by science, is not a d t topic but a dynamic
state that can indicate the way to a more subtle and flexible order than
simplification and repetition.
Another i n h ~ ~ t i aspect
n g is a purposeful departure from equilibrium
identified in certain works of contemporary architectwe. The authors
consider Frank Gehry's Guggenhem Museum in Bilbao and Zaha
Hadid's Museum of the twenty-first century in Rome. They underline
the latteis 'dynamic balance between order and chaos based on the
same rules that govern dissipative systems in the universe.' They note
the fragmentary character of the Guggenhek 'a collision of vohunes
that generates unusual spaces, seemingly by chance, resulting from
deformationof concave and convex surfaces, intawoven and suspended..
a set of fragments that gravitate around a virtual orbit, resembhg a
strange attractor.' Their perspicacious and persuasive interpretation of
these works identifies what I consider a typical aspect of contemporary
art a faithful reflection of the world and society in which we live, in
the most sensitive cases recording the discovery of new perceptive
horizons. This reflective capacity makes the archited a 'seismograph' and
determines the success of these works that are springing up all over
the place, though rarely with the poetic quality of the Guggenheim.
However, their relationship with the cities that host them arouses many
doubts, seeming resigned to unlimited development for its own sake,
rather than committed to the idea of 'sustainable' development based
on awareness of individual and collective responsibility towards the
environment
In the transition from m o h to contempmq, artistic research has
undergone a radical transformation. If art defined itself as 'modern' last
century it was because it aimed not only to r d e d society but also to
change it by questioning values; today, in defining itself 'contemporary,'
art aims for a mere temporal correspondence, unwilling to engage in any
crusade except that of innovation. Van Gogh, Kandinsky, Boccioni, Klee,
even Taut, Mies van der Rohe, and Terrae, painted and designed
counter-trend to change the prevalent orientation of the world in which
they livedI and often their works were only acclaimed by an embattled
minority that shared the reasons for their struggle. By choosing a
peasant's shoes as a subyxt to paint, Van Gogh was ignored for years by
eq&s but made a statement in favor of a world that wanted to change,
prmdmg it with metaphors that would become increasingly eloquent
One may well ask whether the art we see today, that represses
work and effort as useless and web success by satisfying the desire for
'distraction, like a consumer good on display in a supermarket,is worthy
to accompany scientists1 attempts to lead the city 'out of chaos.' From
what was probably an excess of ideology spurring architects and artists to
oppose the eclectic bourgeois consumerism of the time, we have gone
to a form of art that cultivates deresponsibilization, making a show of its
lack of ideology and slnlcing passively into overwhelrmng 'reality.' Is it
legitimate to raise the problem of a type of innovation that recognizes
the value of commitment without betraying the d for freedom
and autonomy that asks how it can contribute to the struggle for
envinmmental awareness? Past misunderstandings created by foolish
ambitions of political commitment pzstify diffidence and doubts about
art, but as far as 1 am concerned, not about architectureI which does
not enjoy the privilegeg of other arts. If you want to see a picture, a
happening, an event, you go to a gallery or a museum, or you can ignore
it. The same is not true of cities and landscape. Even if you do not wish to
see thiem,they enter your life and affect it, influen- your being and
how you live. Even those who do not see are citizens and enjoy or suffer
what architects and governors build. Before it is too late, we need a
'poarchiaedure,' an archiarchitedure that starts from the principle that we
are inhabitants of the Earth, we are part of the Earth and therefore
responsible for what happens on the planetl not cmly for what happens in
our 'developed' comer where the vast majority of the Earth's resources
are consumed, but also for what happens in the rest, in the desolate land
Foreword xiii

inhabited in want, suffering, and grief. And 'geoarchitecture' would


not be enough without 'geo-planning' understood as the discipline of
complexity, concerned with regional systems and capable of producing
maps that are inmeasingly sensitive to the rhythms and needs of
life, capable of suggesting choices that differentiate good from bad

not to wallow in with decadent complacency, but must be studied to


discover the seeds of change through movement and metamorphosis,
a principle of order to cultivate, not in the immobility of equilibrium
but in the mobility of evolution.
This book does not merely divulge methods of knowing and
controlling urban phenomena, but offers examples of the application of
these methods to urban systems like Siena, Cagliari, Pescara, and Milan.
To analyze relations between the city and its surroundings, Odum's
concept of emergy (with an M instead of an N) is introduced. Emergy
quantifies the memory of all the energy necessary to support a process
or system. Applied to an urban system, emergy analysis makes it
possible to iden* and measure the relations that a local setting
establishes with other systems on a local or global scale. Emergy flows
offer a key for more correct and efficient government. In the case of
Pescara and the nearby Adriatic coast, the tool used was mobile phone
traffic, the only field in which Italy is world leader. Use of base station
data to map mobility and relations provides an image of sigruficant
aspects of individual and social behavior, a sort of X-ray that renders
visible the hitherto invisible fabric of immaterial relations animating
a region.
Besides its usefulness in proposing new ways of observing urban
phenomena, the book is of humanistic inspiration, revealing the special
sensitivity of authors who have uprooted the palisades traditionally
separating the two cultures. Chapter 7 began analyzing Jochem
Hendricks's work Newspaper of 1994 that shows a newspaper in which
the text has been replaced by the scan of the readefs eyes. It ends on
this note: 'We coneluded this chapter with a visit to an art gallery
because we Uked to think that att and science share romantic passion
and that cartography is the most scienti$c art and khe most artistic

Paolo Portoghesi
Rome, 2008
Pro1ogue

The title of this book, City out of Qzaos, pays homage to Ilya Prigogine.
Order out of chaos is an expression coined by the father of evolutionary
physics, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1977) to express a key
concept of complexity theory. For scholars of chaos, it is an idiom loaded
with meaning distilled in a handful of bits. Indeed, it condenses a vast
scientific theory which has enormous implications for contemporary
thought
O r h out of chaos implies an event, a novelty emerging from a
circumstance, from a combination of facts in a favourable context, from
a choice, a collision or a chance encounter. Atom form a molecule.
Molecules form cells. Organisms form an ecosystem. Persons form a
society. Words express a thought.
Evolutionary physics is the science of emergence of novelty, the
narrative elements of nature, the formation of living structures and their
evolution in a dynamic and variable world. The city, immersed in this
dynamic world, is the subject of our research. To our eyes, the city is
a living organism, a system that breathes, feeds, takes on an identity
and communicates. We believe that certain theories of evolutionary
thermodynamics, environmental physical chemistry, and ecology,
elaborated in order to understand biological and living systems, can be
extended to the study of social and urban systems and can provide new
elements for interpreting their function. The concepts of dissipative
structure, complexity, and self-organization have in our opinion such
pertinence to the complex world and current problems as to change our
City out of chaos

view of the development and growth of contemporary cities. Faced


with the global environmental crisis, the greenhouse effect, climate
change and resource depletion, the need to change the paradigm of
town planning and urban systems is increasingly evident, and receives
impulse from the evolutionary sciences. The search for a new alliance
between humans and nature proposed by Prigogine and Stengersl
c a b for a new view of human systems and of the relations they
establish with the environment, with sustainability as an aim, as well as
defending the opportunities for present and future generations.
In this book, we deal with many topics and will not be able to
provide complete answers to a l l the questions we raise. We endeavour
to coordinate many thoughts, reflections, and suggestions, and to forge
a coherent, discernible link between chapters. If we were asked what
was the thread of this book, we would probably say it was creativity,
meaning the creativity of nature, a red thread that runs through the fabric
of our work, more or less explicitly. Through theories and practical
examples, we endeavour to demonstrate that we and our ideas,
projects, and desires are an integral part of this creativity. The creative
power of nature cannot be eluded. We cannot plan an artificial world
that completely excludes it or isolate ourselves in a cocoon designed to
fit our model, but we can choose to live in harmony with nature and its
laws. We can plan a way of interacting with the innate creativity of the
systems of which we are part. We can even decide whether or not we
agree with those laws and act to save natural cycles or to irreversibly
impair them. We can choose order or chaos.
To define chaos, it is customary to call on daily experience. A
practical example comes to mind now as we write. The first draft of this
book was very close to the idea we have of chaos.Several months ago,
we began writing all the topics we wanted to include on a clean sheet of
paper. Each topic had direct and indirect links to other topics. Many
were linked together. Lines crisscrossed the page. In a corner, there

1 J?rigogine, I. & Stengers, I., La Nouvelle Alliance. Wtamorphose de la Science. Gallimard:


Pi&, 1W9.
Prologue 3

were words written sideways for lack of space, sentences in capitals,


and others in running writing, without any rhyme or reason. For
several days we continued adding references to the page. In the end,
besides a triumph of key words, names of persons and things, words
scattered in a tangle of ink, there appeared the moist outline of a coffee
cup and the date of a seminar scribbled absent-mindedly in pencil.
Our notes did not bear any evident trace of a structure that could
guide the pen. At a certain stage, the sheet of paper was no longer
coherent and no principle of order could be discerned. The many
thoughts jotted on the page seemed to form a homogeneous whole and
could no longer be distinguished. It was as if one had entered a city,
or urban outskirts, for the first time. All directions were the same and
it was impossible to get one's bearings. It engendered a disquieting
feeling, but was fascinating to think about. The initial scheme was more
like a hypertext, an open structure that we could follow in many
directions. Since then, we put much energy into defining a structure.
It was necessary to make order out of chaos.
The reader can judge our results. We will only say that although
this book observes a criterion of continuity, it contains fractures,
requires jumps, and indicates connections. While the chapters took
form according to a general scheme we had agreed upon, incidents in
daily life, such as a conversation, a phrase heard at a seminar, a photo
in a newspaper, or a scientific news item, influenced the scheme and
suggested path variations. We sometimes referred to literary passages,
contemporary art installations, oscillating chemical reactions, rrtrilung
architecture, stories, invisible cities, imaginary characters, snow flakes,
and tropical storms to describe a scientific theory. This book arose out
of a description of a set of concepts and endeavours to at least partly
reflect the formation of a thought or the birth of a system of relations,
and hopefully a logical conclusion.
The authors are an architect and a physical chemist, student
and teacher. The topics include physical chemistry, evolutionary
thermodynamics, ecology, complexity, aspects of town planning,
City art of chaos

environmental assessment, and architecture. It may seem directed to


architects and tom planners, to whom it communicates notions of
thermodynamics, or it nay seem directed to scholars of environmental,
chemical, and natural sciences, to whom it espouses concepts of
regional planning and architecture.
We knowingly drew from different disciplines because
transdkiplinarity has something to do with complexity theory.
Tratlsdisciplinarity indicates a fusion between disciplines that destroys
academic barriers and creates new disciplines in which everyts.lin% is
morefhanthesumoftheparts. W e a l s o b e l i w e t h a t o n e a f t h e ~
points of transdisciplinarity is the opporhmity of going beyond the
science-humanity dichotomy, as observed by Prigogine when he stated
that scientists do not read Shakespeare and humanists are insensitive to
the beauty of mathemah.
Clearly traflsdisciplinarity must go beyond something. Its essence
lies in fusing pre-existing elements to create something new. In their
manual of ecological economics, Herman Daly, a founder of sustainable
development, and Joshua Farley2 give a good description of the concept
oftransdisciglinarrty:
... tbe disciplinary structarre of knowledge is a problem of
jagmentation, a daficulty to be aue~c#ne rather than a m'twton to be
met. Red problems do not obsem? academic boundaries. We certainly
beliewe that thinking should be 'disciplined' in the sense of obseming
logic and facts, but not 'disciplinary' in the sense of limiting itseIf to
traditiona2 methodologies and tools that have become enshrined in the
academic departments of neoclassical ewnomics.
The aim of this text is therefore not to fully expound all our arguments,
many of which have been analyzed by Ilya Prigogine, Fritjof Capra,
Enzo Tien& and others, but to introduce them synthetically and make
them collide, so that something new emerges.
Entropy and time

The city immersed in time

Irene is one of the most common of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.' It


is a real city that resembles all cities but none in particular. Irene is
immersed in time. It is never the same, like water flowing in a river.
You can observe it from the bank, or in the words of Calvino, 'when
you lean out from the edge of the plateau.' Those who look down from
the heights conjecture about what is happening i n the city but cannot tell
what it's like on the inside, because Irene is continually changing. A
view from inside would be of another city. It would be like diving into
the river and being carried by the current. Irene involves you in its
dynamics, its rhythms, its stories. More than any of the other invisible
cities, it is visible. To our eyes it is a real city because it is immersed in
time and time runs through every instant. The last passage states:
For those who pass it zoithowt entering, the city is one thing; it is
another fir those who are tnapped by if and m r lam. There is the
city where you arrivefir thejrst time; and there is another city which
you leave never to return. Each deserves a diff;rent name; perhaps I
have already spoken of Irene under other flames; perhaps I have spoken
only of Irene.

1 Calvino, I., Invisible Cities. Harcourt Brace JovanovichInc.:New York, 1972.


City out of chaos

From a space to a time culture

In the fifth century K, Heraclitus of Ephesus observed that 'everything


flows.' According to fragments of a cokction of oracular aphorisms,
'the same river brings new water at every instant' and 'the river is
never the same and mortal substances are never in the same stateI but
disperse and collect, come and go, due to the speed and impetuosity
of change.'
Heraclitus observed a world in unceasing movement, from which
no part of nature was excluded. This continuous change manifested
daily by lifeI birth, and death cannot be eluded. However, the position
of science with respect to the 'postulate' of Heraclitus weathered
different seasons in the course of history without finding a place in the
rigorous framework of logic, until recently.
For many years after the great technological developments of
the nineteenth century and simultaneously the advent of thermal
machines and the industrial revolution, science did not recognize the
importance of the flow of time. In their search for univocal answers
and solutions for society's demands' the models of classical mechanics
and thermodynamics and then those of quantum mechanics ended up
excluding timeI reducing it to an infinitesimal abstract entity. In the
perspective of classical physics and thermodynamics, research into
the laws of nature was associated with a reversible, deterministic
description of time, in which no distinction was made between past
and future.
Faced with the need to conduct reproducible experiments that could
serve technologmd development, a great quantity of resources were
invesbed in the study of ideal yields d thermal machines and of the
equivalence of heat and mechanical work. This was theoretically
possible, under the hypothesis of an ideal cycle in which the conversion
of heat into work was reversible, or in other words compensated by an
inverse process that could return the motor to its initial mechanicid and
t h e d state' with perfect temporal symmetry (Carnot cycle). Later
Entropy and #he 7

stages in the devdopment of classical physics built on this assumption


of the reversibility and relativity of time, depending on the observer
and on his position in space. Even the myth of velocity and acceleration
celebrated in the twentieth century with racing cars and beautiful
futurist paintings implied an exhortation to contract time, completely
absorbed in space.
In the early 1970s, a proposal was advanced to reform the
epistemological foundations of science in order to open new perspectives
in the study of life and the unpredictable, irreversible dynamics of nature,
which until then were not included in the range of theoretical models.
Biodiversity, biological evolution, the wealth of new and unexpected
phenomena observed in nature, in an intrinsically dynamic world, posed
questions that classical science exempted itself from considering. The
obseryation of these characteristics of the real world and espeaally
their variations in time, attracted the attention of various scholars and
since then has orientated scientific research towards the new fields of
environmental, ecosystem, and social complexity.
This was a novelty with respect to classical science, the
thermodynamics of thermal machines and quantum physics; the novelty
of the discovery or rather rediscovery of the role of time, its asymmetry,
irreversibility, the unpredidability of events. Time, confined for years in
the worlds of art and literature, rigorously separated from the world of
science, reacquired a role in the foreground of scientific observation,
ecological disciplines and the study of social, economic, and cultural
systems.It changed all the perspectives and aroused new expectations.
The point of this epistemological passage was the recognition
acquired by evolutionary sciences in that period, and some of the
many episodes were essential. In particular, in 1977, Ilya kigogine
was awarded the Nobel prize in chemistry and in 1979he and Isabelle
Stengers published their La Nouvelle Alliance,2 with the proposal to
restore an alliance between humans and nature through science.

2 Prigogine, I. & Stengers, I., La Nouvelk Alliance. Mtmorpk de la Science. Gallimard:


Paris, 1979.
City out of chaos

The excitement surrounding these events was completely new and


required casting a critical eye on m y consolidated principles of
scientific research. Much recent work was questioned and attention
was directed towards the search for new bgical schemes and new
instruments that would include time as an i&sPens&le parameter
for describing nature and events. On this subject, Prigogine3 mote:
Science is a dialogue with nature. Over the past this dialogue has
taken mayferms. Wefie1 that we are at the end of the period which
started with Galileo, Copemicars and Newton and culminated with
the discovery of quantum mechanics and relativity. This is a glorious
period but in spite of all its maroellous achievements, it led to an
mrsimplped picture of nature, a picture which neglected esserrtial
aspects. Classical science emphnsized stability, order and equilibrium.
Today we discover instabilities and fluctuations everywhere. Our
view of nature is changing dramatically. On all levels of nature
we see the emergence of 'narrative elements'. We are reminded of
Scheherazade who intempts her beautifil story to start another one,
even more beauti&l. In nature also we haae the cosmological histmy
which includes the history of matter, the history of lifi, of humans and
so on till we come to our individual history associated with our
consciousness. At all levels we obseme events associated with the
emergence of novelEy that we may associate with the creative power
of nature.
After this,the observation of narrative, evolutionary, and unscpecbed
-
phenomena became a node of the new science. The world is immersed in
the flow of time, the irreversibility of which causes disparity
- .
between
abstract deteminbtic models and real evolutionary systems. The
existence of the arrow of time underlines the irreversible process of
nature. On the basis of this assumption, evolutionary physics finally
superseded the heritage of debermjnistic approaches based on the
relativity of time. The irreversibility of time prevents any abstract model
from being exhaustive and any prediction from being likely in cases
applied to animate subjects.

3l%go@e, I., From a Spe to a Time Culture. Foreword in: Tkzzi, E. The End of Time.
WIT Press: Southamptun, 2003.
Entropy a% time 9

In practice, Prigogine proposed a rereading of the general laws of


thermodynamics in an evolutionary framework, in which time finally
played an unconditional primary role in modeling and scientific
knowledge. In his words, 'Time is no more opposing man to nature
but on the contrary marks his belonging to an inventive and creative
~niverse'.~ He proposed an opening with respect to consolidated
approaches, that sprang from a reformation, or according to some, a
revolution, of scientific thought, and caused a clear break between
two branches of science. The fracture was between two worlds, or two
world views: the reductionist view of Descartes and the holistic
view of Pascal; the mechanistic view of technological domination and
the evolutionary view of adaptable systems; the determinist view of
univocal solutions and predictive models and the emergentist view
embracing unexpected, irreversible, and unpredictable events.
All this warned of an impending change of paradigm that would
revolutionize science and technology, a change necessary whenever
divergence between theory and reality became too great, according to
Thomas Kuhn.5 In a certain sense, order was somehow being made.
'Order out of chaos,' in fact, is an expression dear to the school of
Prigogine.

Entropy and the arrow of time

It is uncanny the way Prigogine and Stengers6manifest their perplexity


about the reversible, aatremporal nature of classical thermodynamics, faced
with the technology of nimtemthcentury thermal machines:
But if, as is reasonable to suppose, the sight of thermal machines, the
red-hot boilers of locomotives in which coal burns without return to
produce movement, creates an abyss behoeen the classical spirit and

Cit Prigogine in Tiezzi 2003.


5 Kuhn, T.S., The S h u d u r a of Scientifi Revolutions. University of Chicago Press: Chicago,
1%2.
6 Cit Prigogine & Stengers 1979.
10 City out of chaos
19th century culture, it is also noteworthy that physics initially
believed that this abyss could be ignored, that it could describe the
nau machines as it desmibed the ancient ones, solely from the point of
view of equivalence and ideal yield. Physics thought it could ignore
the fizet that what was consumed by steam engines disappeared
Brezler. No thermal machilze will ever give b c k the coal it devoured,
This observation implies the intention of Prigogine and his
students to extend the field of thermodynamics from machines to the
resources that fuel them, from a simple isolated system to an open
system that exchanges with its envirooment,from gears of notors to
the categories of evolution and life, with respect to which the limits of
classic~thermodynamicsare evident. This path, which leads to the
formulation of the foundations of the new evolutionary physics,
begins from where it was interrupted.
In 1850, Clausius observed that all real energy balances were in
fact in deficit with respect to the ideal thermal machine. In line with
the law of conservation of energy (first principle of thermodynamics),
in real processes the yield of thermal machines was subject to losses
due to friction, where movement was transformed into heat or in
general into the heat dispersion described by Fourier. According to
Prigogine and Stengers:
In this context the irreversible propagation of heat becomes synonymou~
with loss of efficiency; since 1852 it has become synonymous with the
universal degradation of mechanical energy.
Indeed, these considerations were a premise for the second
principle of thermodynamics, formulated by CIausius in 1865 using a
new language. The word entropy, from the Greek ~vcpofiil(change,
evolution, confusion) was the name given to those dissipated flows
that cannot be returned to the hot source by running the thermal
machine backwards. The next step was to formulate the principle in a
more extended form, in the framework of a universal model, through
a leap from machines to cosmology, made possible by the proposition
of William Thomson Ford Kelvin) followed by Qausius.
Entropy and time 11

Clausius recognized the existence in nature of an inevitable trend


towards a state of maximum entropy, a state in which energy, though
conserved according to the first principle, was dwpersed as heat into
great cold sinks, gradually reducing all gradients. With every real
transformztion ocrrurring in the universe there is an increase in entropy
due to a spontaneous process by which energy is progressively stored at
lower temperatures, with loss of quality. Indeed heat released cannot be
used unless an even colder source is found. In other words, the entropy
of the universe, or an isolated portion of it, tends to a maximum which is
equivalent to a spontaneous trend towards a state of thermodynamic
equilibrium or total uniformity that Clausius defined as a final condition
of thermal deatk Prigogine and Stengers describe this trend as follows:
Dipences that produce effects &crease progressively in nature; the
world, going j+om one conversion to another, exhausts its difirences
and goes towards the final state &fined by Fourier, the state of
thermal equilibrium in which there is no longer any diwence Utat
can produce eficts.
Thus the first principle formulated the concept of energy from a
comervation point of view while the second formulated that of
entropy from an evolutionary point of view. In an isolated system,
the growth of entropy is equivalent to spontaneous evolution of the
system, as underlined by Prigogine and Stengers:
The increase in entropy is no longer synonymous with losses, nau the
entropy is linked to natural processes occurring in the system that bring
it to a state of thermodynamic equilibrium, a state of maximum entropy
in which no o h entropy-producing proms m occur. [Thqr add]
Entropy thus becomes an indicator ofevolution, it expresses thejizct that
in physics Ulere exists an arrow of time; the j b r e of any isolated
system is the direction in which entmpy increases.
The second principle and the concept of entropy elicited research in a
branch of thermodynamics, concerned essentially with evolving
systems. In order to understand the behavior of these systems and
take their irreversible evolutionary nature into account, the main
point to investigate is closely related to the concept of entropy.
Dissipative structtms

The second law is proof of passing time and increadng entropy, like
the sand flowing in an hour-glass, an inexorable cosmic clock that
drives one-way evolution of the universe? Total universal entropy
is greater at any time than it was the instant before. Dissipation due
to irreversible propagation of heat is an evolutionary component
that not only measures the passing of time but also indicates the
irreversible direction of evolution of the universe and of all isolated
systems, towards a flat, uniform state, devoid of differences and
exchanges. This state is defined equilibrium. To have a more intuitive
idea of this relentless process, we can imagine a common thermal
exchange between a hot source and a cold sink, such as a body
immersed in a cooler liquid. We know experimentally that heat flows
spontaneously for as lmg as the body and the liquid are at different
temperatures. Heraclitus said it in his own way, announcing modern
thermodynamics: 'Cold things warm up and hot things cool down.'
The finalstate of themodynanic equilibrium is when temperature is
uniform; in the absence of a thermal gradient, there will be no further
exchange of energy between the body and the liquid. Thus we may
well ask whether the future is given8
The hypothesis that the future is predetermined is belied by the
history of biological evolution that moves in the opposite direction to
thermodynamic equili'brium. Biological systems seem to contradict the
second principle of thernodynamics. They develop in the opposite
direction, towards lower entropy and away from equilibrium, as
witnessed by the appearance of @io)diversity, distinct (eco)systems,
organization, and information. Although the universe has a unique
'style' towards loss of identity and of order, towards indifferentiation
and disorder, clearly the life of living organisms involves creation
of order and information in the form of molecules, organisms,

7 Tiezzi, E., L'Equilibrio. I Dhrsi Aspetti di un Unico Concetto. Cum: Napoli, 1995.
8 Prigogine, I., Is future Given?World Scientific:River Edge, NJ,#XXJ.
ecosystems, societies, and other organized structures. Today, observing
these complex relations between entropy and biological evolution, we
know that in nature! within the limits imposed by the second principle,
there are many opportunities for systems to evolve and that in any case
it is possible to observe that these processes occur in a coherent way,
never in contradiction with thermodynamic laws.
I&o AokP observed and measured changes in entropy in a living
system. He revealed variations in entropy in a man and a woman from
birth to old age. He found that the entropy of an individual varies in
the course of a &time. Entropy decreases during development up to
1618 years of age (Aoki found that women develop earlier and more
intensely). Entropy achieves a minimum and remains constant in the
intermediate phase of life, increasing progressively in old age. Other
stu&eslo in which entropy production was calculated in the different
stages of development of an ecosystem, such as a lake, a marine
environment, or an agricultural or forest system, showed similar
results, with variations occurring in annual cycles.
Ordered complex structures, like a person, an organism, an
ecosystem, or a city (as we shall see), are systems that can achieve and
maintain low levels of entropy in time.This aptitude was described by
Nicolis and Prigoginell by the so-called principle of minimum erzhpy.
Living system tend towards minimum entropy staks, eluding
thermodynamic equiliirium and staying as far as possible from it. The
condition for life, growth, and development of organisms depends on
continuous exchange with the surrounding environment.

9Aoki, I., Entropy production in living syskxmx from organisma to ecosystems.


~ n n o c h i m i c Acta,
a 250, pp. 359-370,1995.
l'JLud~visi,A., Use of the thennodynnunic indices as ecological indicators of the
development state of lake ecosystems: specific dissipaticm. Ecological Indicators, 6(1),
pp. 30-42, 2006; Ludovisi, A & Poletti, A, Use of the thermodynamic indices as
ecological indicators of the development stak of lake ecosystems, 1: entropy production
indices. Ecological Modelling, 159, pp. 203-222, 2003; Ludovisi, A, Pandolfi, P., &
T a W M.1, The strategy of ecosystem development the specific dissipation as an
indicator of ecosystemmaturity.Jollrnal ofTheoretica1 Biology,!B5, pp. 33-43,2005.
11 Nicoh, G.& Prigogine, I., Exploring Complexity.An introakfion. Piper: Munich, 1987.
City out ofchaos

l l X 3 k w m ~ 1 1 2 n ~ o f e n ~ .
Prigoghe's work on the h e o n of ardered ~~in pen
dissipative systems led to a two-tern definition of entropy:

where fhe h t term &S, is entropy produced b i d e the system by


irrev&bfe processes, the second, AS, is the entropy crossing the
Entropy and time 15

borders of the system. The first term is the result of irreversible


transformations due to interactions between elements inside the
system, without any outside cooperation, as if the system was
isolated. It is always positive, in line with the second principle applied
to isolated systems. The second term is the one characterizing
dissipative structures and is the result of exchanges with the outside
in the form of energy input and entropy output. It can be negative.
The total change in entropy dS obtained by summing the two terms
may be negative (entropy decrease) or zero (entropy remains constant
at minimum levels) if:

On this bask a dissipative structure can generate ordered structures


within itself; it has the capacity to self-organize, self-structure, and
maintain itself far from thermodynamic equilibrium. The condition
for this to happen is that entropy produced (positive variation) by
internal processes must not exceed the negative variation made
possible by exchange with the outside.
This entropy variation can be explained by the formalization of
Prigogine13 that describes two possible cases of evolution of systems
towards a state of equilibrium with maximum entropy (Fig. 1) or
towards a steady state, a dynamic state of minimum entropy (Fig. 2).

Figure 1: Entropy variation of a system towards thermodynamic


equilibrium. The curve S (to the right) comes from the sum of S,
(to the left) and Si (in the middle).

uPrigo@e, I., Introduction to Tkmodynamics of I m r s i b l e Processes. C.C. Thomas:


Springfield, MA, 1954.
In the evolution of an isolated system towards equilibrium, the term
&S is zero. In an open or closed system, &S may even be negative but
not so negative as to cancel out the variation in 4S, which can only be
positive. In all these cases, the entropy of the system goes towards a
maximum, which is a state of equilibrium, a state in which there is no
further change in entropy.
In evolution towards a steady state, the tmm &S must be negative
and therefore the system may anly be open or closed. Once the steady
non-equilibrium state is reached, exchange with the outside continues
to be necessary to cancel out the positive variation diS and keep entropy
constant around a minimumvalue.
The point is that interaction of the system with the outside is the
condition for Me of the system. In an isolated system, entropy increases
to a maximum, according to the second principle, reaching a state of
equilibrium. On the other hand, an open system may reduce its
entropy. In the words of Erwin Schrager,U living organisms 'feed on
negentropy, attracting a current of negative entropy to compensate the
increase in entropy they produce by living and thus to maintain
themselves at a steady level with low entropy.'
Entropy mid time 17

I The importance of entropy lies in its evolutionary character15.


The transition from low entropy input to high entropy output in a
dissipative structure describes the evolution of far-from-equilibrium
systems. The irreversibility of this trend is further confirmation of the
concept of the arrow of time. The history and succession of events are
of scientific importance in terms of entropy balance. Energy is always
conserved but entropy may vary, increasing or decreasing according
to system organization. Quality and information are concepts related to
each other through entropy. There is a significant correspondence
between entropy and loss of organization, between entropy and loss
of information. Entropy dissipated by a system corresponds to a gain
in negentropy, to use Schr6dinger's term, which is an increase in
information, complexity, and organization, a l l important related factors
in the study of dynamic systems far from equilibrium. On this subject,
Fritjof Capra16wrote:
In classical thermodynamics, the dissipation of energy in heat
transfir, fiction, and the like was always associated with waste.
Prigogine's concept of a dissipative structure introduced a radical
change in this view by showing that in open systems dissipation
becomes a source of order.

'5 Tiezzi, E., Steps Towards an Evolutionary Physics. WIT Press: Southampton, 2007.
16 Capra, F., The Web of Lifi. Anchor: New York, 19%.
Space and time

Once an Arabian geographer lived in Palemo at the court of the


Norman King. He was a great traveller. Roger I1 admired his wisdom
and Idrisi repaid him by drawing wonderful maps of the lands and
seas of Sicily that ranged to the coasts of Morocco and Andalusia, to
the sources of the Nile, namely the Mountains of the Moon, and along
the road to the Indies. He included sea routes and horse routes. The
maps had one peculiarity because the distances were proportional
to travelling time, not to distance. The time maps showed both space
and time. Clearly, crossing mountains and forests takes longer than
travelling on plains.
Today we are accustomed to viewing the world in terms of space,
often ignoring h e ; however in history, nature and human events,
time is fundamental. 'the memories are more important than the
kilometrers covered.'l Space, its evolution, its perception, is only a
form of tine that passes.

Tiezzi, E., Beauty and Science. WIT Press: Southampton, 2005.


20 City out of d u o s

Energy guzzling, dissipative cities.


Through the s.tEtciyof far-from-quibbrilum systems, thermodynamics is
able to represent the relations between dynamic s-ctures, such as
living systems, the evolution of WMis inexorably W d by physical
cons&& and the environment. The definition of general belraviour
in the logical framework of evolutionary thermodynamics offers a key
for rigorous study of natural system, ecosystems, living organisms,
and their dynamics in tine. By analogy with human systems, certain
concepts and definitions can be extended to the study of human
behaviour, explaining trends and evolutions of social, economic, and
Space and time 21

urban systems, such as the action of a population on a region or the


overall nature of relations between a community and its natural or built
environment.
Prigogine' emphasized the non-equilibrium condition of dissipative
structures:
Today we know that matter behaves in a radically & B e n t manner
under non-equilibrium oonditions, Hurt is, when i m m ' b l e phenomena
play a fundamental role. One of the most spectacular aspects of this new
behaviour is the formation of non-equilibrium structures that exist only
for as long as the system dissipates energy and continues to interact
with the outside world. Here is an mkient contrast with equilibrium
structures, such as qstals, that, onceformed, can remain isolated and
me dead structures that do not dissipate energy. The most simple
example of dissipative structures that w e can evoke by analogy is the
city. A city is difirenffrom the countryside that surround. it; the roots
of its individuation lie in the relations it entertains with the adjacent
countryside:if the countryside was eliminated, the city m 1 d diqpear.
Cities are physical systems in contact with various sources and sinks.
Flows of matter and energy from sources to sinks enable ordered
structures to be formed, maintaining them in time; in the end these
flows are dissipated as wastes and other pollutants to external sinks.
In other words, an urban system is an open system characterized by
input of low entropy resources and high entropy output. A city is part
of a vast region and many processes occurring in the city have wide
ranges of action or even a global dimension. If there were not energy
flows going in and out, it would not be possible to build ordered
forms and maintain them in time, and the system would be
abandoned and would fall to ruin.
The capacity of complex structures to self-order and maintain
themselves in time is equivalent to conserving a steady state (dynamiaty,
diversity, life), far from thermodynamic equilibrium and to maintain
minimum levels of entropy through interactions between constituents

Prigogjne, I., 7% End of Certainty: Time, Chaos and the New Laws of Nature. Free Press:
New York, 1997.
City out of chaos

and betwen systems. In entropy a city tendsto reduce its internal


entropy by self-orpizing as s t r v ~ information,
I social assdsI
economy, and cultwe. Flows of res0ufy:es feed the dissipative stmdure
n'&~are~boMasinan~asifthRcitywereaset
of organisms; they are spent constantly to conserve the city's ordered
structure in time.
Mathias ~~~~~~~3 proposed a similar interpretation of the
economic system, which implies the presence of an urban system In his
viewI the economic system can be likened to a dissipative structure far
from thermodynamic equilibrium. The evolution and maintenance of
economic system is possible by virtue of inputs of natural resources
from tmr&&d ecosystem and output of heat and waste towards
terrestrial ecosystens. If the total entropy balance sheet is considered,
it is evident that a system of production creates order from disorder
and economic wealth at the expense of the enviranment However, as
Georgescu Roegen4 highlighted, in entropy terms,any action or process
(whether biological or economic) results in a deficit for the overall
system: the cost is always greater than the result.
Nicholas Georgesm-Roegen developed a thennodynamic view of the
economic system Like Schr(Idinger7 who stated that living organisms
feed on negentropy (and therefore compete for it), Georgescu-Roegen
wrote that the economic struggle is a struggle for new sources of low
entropy from the environment. H is bioeconomic proposal springs from
two questions: (1)infinite economic growth contradicts the basic laws of
nature; and (2) the reversible and circular representation of production
and consumption in the economic system needs to be replaced by an
evo1utionary version of the economic process within the biophysical
context that supports it. In his viewl the economic process is irrevexsible,
like all biological processes, and depends on a material base. In other

3Binswange1, M., Prom microscopic to mcroscopic theories: entropic aspects of


ecologicaland economic processes. Ecological Economics, 8, pp. 209-254,1993.
4 Georgescu-Roegen,N., Energy and Economic Myths. Pergamon Press: New York, 1976.
5s&&inger, E., What Is Lifi? The Physical Aspects of the Living Cells. Cambridge
University Press: Cambridge, 1944.
Space and tinie 23

words, the economic system is an open system characteriszed by input of


precirous resources (low entropy, scarcity) and output of worthless waste
@gh entropy).
The greater the system, the greater the size of the flows involved
in its processes; the greater the system, the more urgent the need
to absorb resources (low-entropy inputs) and to get rid of entropic
wastes (high-entropy output). Hence for an economic system or a city
based on this e c o m y to survive indefinitely, it must be coherent
with the physical constraints imposed by thermodynamics and must
preserve the ecological basis and ecosystem services on which it rests.
Once the dissipative nature of the economic process and dependence
on natural sources and sinks are recognized, problems and demands
for running a city or a large regional system may be reformulated in a
new light.

Two speeds of technology and nature.

Thermodynamics raises a question directly linked to the global


environmental crisis and impelling problems such as depletion of
resourcesI greenhouse effect, and climate change. Any ordered structureI
such as a city, an economic system, a society, depend on nature and on
nature's capacity to regenerate resources and absorb entropic wastes. In
this context and with particular reference to social systems, Edgar Morin6
underlined that the autonomy of a social, economic, or urban system is
based on depdem on the environment, Autonomy and dependence are
complementary conceptsIthough they appear to be opposites, because a
system needs resources to self-organize and maintain its individuality
and originality. Hence, self-organization and eco-organization must be
linked.Autonomy is impossible without dependence.

6Morin,E., Le vie d e b complessit8. In G. Bocchi & M.Ceruti (a cura di). La s$& della
Cmpkssitd. Feltrinelli: Milano, 1995.
City out of chaos

The concept of sustainability can be fomulaM for a city, for the


society it hosts and its economy in the terms used by Morin, autonomy
and dependence. Cities depend on goods and services directly derived
from the environment. The use and availability of natural resources is
currently the critical factor threatening the subsistence of cities and their
~ o e c o n o m i structure.
c
Cities are autonomous evolving systems that adapt their internal
dynamics according to relations with the outside, in a relationship of
dependence. The t;hermodynmnics of dissipative structures describes
the general f u n c t i h g of a city and establishes conditions. The
formation and subsistence of structures, such as buildings, urban
fiuzetions, the economy,and culture, are processes that absorb resources
from the environment and dissipate energy and matter. These
processes therefore impact the environment on a vast scale and now
demand close observation of the ecological dynamics on which cities
depend.
The path towards urban ecological awareness starts with the
definition of the capacity of the ecosystem to carry the load of
the resident population. Sustainability is a concept linked to the total
limited availability of resources and the ability of a finite ecosystem
to absorb wastes. Herman Daly,7 one of the founders of Ecological
Ecanomics, provided an essential key to this simple definition, based
again on the concept of time. His two 'obvious' principles of
sustainability are:8
(1) Renewable resources should be consumed at a rate that enables
nature to regenerate them (Principle of SustainableYield).
(2) Reduction of goods should not produce wastes that cannot be
absorbed by the system in a reasonably brief time but accumulate
(Principleof Absorbing Capacity).

7 Daly, H.E., Steady State Economics: The Economics of Biopkysical Equilibrium and Moral
Growth. W.H.Freeman: San Francisco, CA, 1977.
8 M y , H.E.,Toward some operational prindples of sustainable development.Ecofogical
Economics, 2, pp. 16,1990.
Space and time 25

The capacities to regenerate and absorb must be regarded as natural


capital; failure to maintain these capacities must be regarded as
consumption of capital, and therefore unsustainable.
The problem of sustainability is a problem of divergence between
'historical time' and 'biological time.'. In the first edition (1984) of his
book The End of Time,g Enzo Tiezzi wrote:
Not only is economics ignorant of these concepts, but it introduces
another concept which can be summed up as 'time is money.'. Progress
is measured by speed of production. It has even been suggested that the
faster we use up nature's resources, the greater the advance of progress.
In other words, the faster we transfimn nature, the mme time we
save. This technological or economic concept of time is exactly the
opposite to 'entropic time.'. Nature obeys rkjbent laws to economics, it
~ J r in s 'entropic time': the fkster we consume natural resources and
the energy available in the world, the less time is Eeftjb~acr sunrival.
'Technological time' is inversely proportional to 'entropic time';
'economictime' is invarsely proportional to 'biological time.'
Our limited resources and the limited resistance of our planet and
its atmosphere clearly indiate that the more we accelerate the energy
and matterflav t h m g h our Earth systeni, the shorter is the l@ span of
our species. An organism which consumesfaster than the environment
produces cannot survive, it has chosen a dead branch of the evolutionsy
tree; it has chosen the road taken by the dinosaurs.
Money time and clock time are not the scales on which a correct
relationship with nature can be established. Paradoxically the clock
which is a symbol of order, strikes the hours of disorder; frenetic
consumetism and growth of production advance the hour of global
disorder. The nahral order has other rhythms, another time scale.
Man cannot stop time but he can s l m down the process of entropy
and evolution which will favour a transition to a state of minimum
enfropy production andl in the long run, fmour the &ture of our
species.
At the recent international conference on Management of ResourcesI
Sustainable Development and Ecological Hazards (2006), Nobel

9Tie* E., The End of T i m . WIT Press: Soutkampton, 2003; Tiezzi, E., Tempi Ston'ci,
Tempi Biologici (1st e d ) .Garamti: Milano, 1984.
City out of chaos

laureate Adolfo Phz-Esquivello exhorted scientists to tackle and solve


the p m b b of the dissonance between QchnolO&icaland natural h:
The equilibrium behoeen man and nature has been broken. Science and
technology haw caused an acceleration of the natural cycle. Every being
has its own cycle tad this acceleration has duxtrged liys objectives
and conditions, resulting in marginalisation. The main n m l f y of
technology is the acceleration and velocity of time. It is no coincidence
that Gdileo, at the moment of the birth of modwn scienae, was sfudytnf:
accelerafion, and that the most expensive piece of nuclear physics
equipment, nowadays, is jbr fhe accpleration of pa&'c&s. Tfme in
tecknobgy is &@nt fiwn cosmic time and human time, mzd because
of that, technology has the awesome paoer of modifying not only human
nature, but Nature itself:
On one hand, the-avalanche of technology cannot be stopped; a
type of fatality exists in all @ids leading towards the most complete
technology. It is no longer the machitre that must adapt itself to man,
but he who must adapt to the rhythm of the machine. This sitaurtion
leads to the human being becoming more and more divorced porn
nature, b e m e of the use and abuse of nahral resources, by h b p e d
countries in particular, and their responsibility fbr the hmsf2r of
pollutants to &veloploplng countries. 1...] Time becomes a critical factor
in the production pcess. It is now evident that in all cost-he$t
relat.ions, the time fador intewenes den'sbely, and a rn system of
indimdual and social values aperates under the su@ce. The great
danger in the current millennium is that the fast world and the slow
world ara out of phase. Everything seems to indicate that there is an
imminent and progressive isolation of the dispossessed towards afhtal
solitude, due to the acceterated isolation of the world, of wealth with
its c~mtmlof vital mechanisms. In our present world, which is
characterised by the process of acceleration, Iif2 in our planet is at risk.
We met him shortly after and asked him more about the acceleration
of time caused by technologyll.

10P&ez-Esquivel, A., Patagonia Declaration. From the first international conference on


management resources, sustainable developments and ecological hazards - Ravage of
the planet. Wessex Institute of Technology: BslTiloche, Argentina, 2006.
" P&ez-Esquivel, A., Pulselli, RM. & Rossi, F., The two velocities of technology and
nature a co~vermtionwith Adolfo P h z Esquivel. InZemtimal Journal of Ecodynmnics,
2(2), pp. 8347,2007.
$ace and time 27
This caar be seen by obsem'ng s&na and technologyI amltlration and
speed. It's 4s if #me were two phases between technology a d l*,
because the time and rhythm of human beings and of nature are
difirent, and tlrt? accelerntion prmoked by Cchnology breaks this
rhythm. It is important 50 ask oneself now hdu, to newly r e m r
balance, kmse othedse we will surely erid up being s l m s of
technology rather than making use of technologyjbr a better world,
At the end of our meeting in Pafagonia, on a veranda ovmlooking
Lake Nahud Huapi, a si&t that floods the senses and makes peace
with the world, Perez-EsglziYe1expressed this last idea:

A map of time.

In our opinion, the two speeds of technology and nature, historical


and biological time, clarify the meaning of ecological thought. The
phase difference between frenetic man-made production and the
natural regeneration times of resources is particularly evident. This
concept is the basis of the Ecological Footprint conceived by William
E. Reesl2 and Mathis Wackernagell3 in the 1990s.This environmental
accounting tool is based on criteria that assign a n equivalent area of
terrestrial ecosystems, expressed in global hectares (gha) to resources
Z
1 * Rees, W.E, Ecological footprints and appropriated carrying capacity: what urban
economics leaves out. Enmronment and Urbanisation,4, pp. 121-130,1992
13 Wackemagel, M. & Rees, W.E., Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the
Earth. New Society Publishers: Gabriola Island, 1996.
28 City out of chaos

consumed by populations. In other words, each consumer good,


such as a kilo of bread or a kilowatt hour of electricity corresponds
to an area of land that regenerates the resources used to obtain the
good and to absorb the emissions associated with its production.
Calculation of a hypothetical area of Qrr&ial ecosystems needed to
sustain the activity of a population for a year corresponds in theory to
a speed, because it measures the amount of space covered in unit time
(e.g., a year). In other words, the Ecdogical Footprint is a measure of
the speed with which a population uses nature compared to the speed
of regeneration by natural cycles.
The relation between space and time is a well articulated concept
in the theoretical framework of the Ecological Footprint. Like any
velocity, the ratio between space and time can be measured with a
chronometer. How long would the world population take to consume
the resources genefated by the area of all the ecosyskms of the
planet? Or in other words how long would it take to cover that area?
What is the speed of our consumption?The sixth of October 2007 was
'Ecological Debt Day,' the day on which the world population
consumed all the environmental resources that the planet produced
that year. It was the day when technology overshot nature and
humankind went into the red. Ecological Debt Day was announced by
Mathis Wackernagel, director of the Global Footprint Network based
in Oakland, Wornia, USA, an organization that calculates the
Ecological Footprint of nations every two years and compares it with
the capacity of ecosystems to generate new resources and absorb the
wastes produced. Humankind is now consutning the equivalent of the
resources generated by 1.3 planets. In 1996, humankind was already
using 15% more natural resources than the planet was producing
and the day marking the beginning of ecological overshoot was in
November. This year, werexploitation of resources amounts to almost
30%. Overexploitation amounts to progressive depletion of natural
capital that is irreversibly impairing the possibility of regeneration of
part of the available resources.
Space and time 29

Living Planet Repd14 published a map of the world in which


countries were represented in proportion to their overall Ecological
Footprint. The map is deformed: countries with an ecological deficit
appear larger and countries with lower footprints or an ecological
surplus appear reduced in size. The scale of greys reflects the per capita
footprint and shows that a tiny proportion of the world population lives
under conditions of extreme duence.

i'.

Figure4 Ecological Footprint of the countries of the world (Living Planet


Report 2006).

In this deformed map of the world, two velocities are evident: the
velocity of the swollen northern hemisphere with the affluent western
world (USA and Europe) and the vast populations of the east (especially
India and China) in contrast to the thin wasted south, particularly most
of Africa.This is the map of time as we see ittoday,justas Idrisisaw
the world deformed according to travelling time in the days of the
Palennitan court of Roger 11. The map of today is a little different from
yesterdafs map. How different it will be tomorrow depends on the
speed of our lives and on the choices we make.

14UNEP, WCMC & WWF., Living Plmet Repwt. World Wildlife Fund Editor, 2006,
Order out of chaos

Oscillating reactions

In the fifties and sixties, two R W scientists, Boris Borisousov and


Araatol Zhabotinsky, discovered the most famous of all oscillating
chemical reactions (now known as the Belousov-Zhabotinsky or BZ
reaction). The discovery sparked intense debate in the field of applied
physical chemistry. Oscillating reactions involve spontaneous variations
in certain chemicals in solution. Under suitable test conditio~ls,this
phenomenon creates spectacular and rapid changes in color. Tke periodic
variations in concentration of reaction intermediates and catalysts cause
variations in their geometry, form, and color.
The creation of spatiotemporal structures is extremely interesting
because it causes macroscopic self-organization that depends on
microscopic interactions between organic and inorganic elements in
the system. Order is created from an initial state of uniformity and
chaos. Interaction betureen the elements, induced by kinetics and
internal diffusion, is a necessary condition for structures organized in
space and time to form. Oscillations can only be obsemed in systems
that exchange energy and matter with the outside. This enables the
system to remain far from equilibrium, in other words in a dynamic,
variable, and non-homogeneous state.
32 City out of chaos

Research into the chemistry of oscillating reactions offers a further


field of observation with respect to traditional chemical mechanics, which
is c~tzcernedwith the geometric assemblage and formal organization of
atom and molecules in nature. The new physics endeavors to study
the complex evolution of systems, such as oscillating reactions, obeying
nonlinear rules. By turning their attention to phenomena with complex,
self-organizing behavior, physlral chemists took the first steps towards
understanding lrvlng systems. Evolutionary physical chemistry studies
phenomena that give rise to novelty, in which order is generated out of
chaos, in an endeavor to understand life and its self-oqpnbjng capacity.

Observing the beautiful circles that form on the surface of the solution
when the BZ reaction occurs, one of the invisible cities of Calvino
comes to mind, a city in which tiny entities form continuously and
grow inside each other in widening circles.
Olinda is certainly not the only city that grozm in concentric circles, like
free trunks which each year rzdd one more ring. [...I old wah
expand bearing the old quarters with them, enlarged, but maintaining
their proportr'ons on a broader horizon at the edges of the city; they
s u m n d the slightly newer quarters, which also g e m up on the
margins and became thinner to IprakE! room jbr still more mcent ones
pessingjhm inside; and so, on and on, to the heart ofthe city, a totally
new Olinda which, in its reduced dimensions retains thefirhtres and the
floul of lymph of the first Olinda and of all the Olindas that haw
blossomed m from the other; and wihin this krrrermost circle there are
already blossoming - though it is hard to discern them - the next
0lin.h and those that will gww after it.
Order out of chaos 33

How organization comes out of chaos

A steady state is a stable dynamic state. It is not a state of equilibrium.


The condition for a system to remain in a non-equilibrium state is that
it be an open system (exchanging energy and matter with the outside)
or a closed system (exchanging energy with the outside), with
nonlinear dynamics. The behavior of a system that interacts with its
environment by a c w i n g and dissipating energy and matter (or only
energy) is sensitive to changes in conditions. An increase in the flow
of energy from outside, depletion of a source of primary materials, or
an impediment to dissipation of entropy (as heat, gaseous emissions,
or solid wastes) are examples of perturbations that could upset the
system. A perturbation is defined as an episode, occurring by chance in
a system, which modifies one of its properties locally and usually
weakly.' In nature, instability to perturbations may enable unexpected
manifestations and new phenomena. In certain circumstances, a
perturbation of far-from-equilibrium systems such as Prigogine's
dissipative structures, may cause a change in system organization,
letting new spatial configurations and temporal rhythms emerge as a
temporary result of a continuous search for harmony.
In other words, the interation of far-from-equilibrium systems with
the outside and the nonlinearity of relations inside them are two factors
underlying self-organization, a property of dissipative structures.
A system with these properties can take different configurations.
Which of the many possible configurations is chosen depends on
relations with the outside and on internal relations between the
elements of the system. The organization that emerges is the one in
which the mutual disposition of elements, subject to continuous
fluctuations, responds best to external impulses, adapting to the latter
as harmoniously as possible. This process of adaptation and selection
(one of many possible organizations is 'selected') involves the system

1 Nicolis, G.& Prigogine, I., Exploring Complexity. An Introduction. Piper: Munich, 1987.
34 City out of chos

macroscopically and its elements microscopically. The flucrtuations


develop on a microscopic scale as a consequence of the mutual
proximity of elements, and may also affect structure formation
throughout the system.
A well-known example of & o
n- is the simple phenomenon
of thermal convection, known as h d instatn'tity. Henri BQlard observed
that whm a thin layer of liquid is heabed uniformly from underneath, heat
is tnuvdkd through the liquid from the bottom up by conduction. If the
dBerme in bmtperature between the upper and lower surfaces of tire
liquid is increased beyond a certain threshold, convectim proces~es
disposed in ordered structures appear. It is !anpMngthat from a uniform
m d i h of the liquid, an inmme in temperature gradient beyond a
a$ical point makes the homogeneous state unstable and con-
currents form and pervade the w b k layer in an intziguingly mgdaf
palrbem The thausands of molecules involved in the convection amen&
behave c0hem-d~:all begin to move tog&er and line up in vertid
corridors in which ascending hot alternate with descending cold
cwnrente;. BQlard also noted that this functionalorganization observed.in a
vertkalsedionhasanevenaore~gstrudurewhenviewedfKnn
above. The h o h t a l surface of the lipid shows hexagonal cells in WM
hot cu~lrentsrise along a central corridor and cold currents descend around
the sides.
BQlard cells are therefore coherent dynamic structurps that form by
self-orgamization, due to an extend perturbation and small interactions
W e e n dements. The latter determine the direction of rotation of the
vortices in an unpredictable manner. Prigogine called this pracess
'order by fluctuations,' under- that a microscopic fluctuation is
amplified until it pervades the whole system, creating an ordered
stntdure. He and %gers2wrote:
W e an imagine dissipative structures as @tfluctuatiolls mmmMntained by
flows ofozergy d matter. Indeed they are the result offluchdations,but
oncefirmed may k stable with respect to a vast range ofpertur&ztions.

2 Wgogine, I. & Stengers, I. La Nmvelle Allhce. Gallimard: Paris, 1979.


I
Order out of chaos 35
In the case described by BQlard, the organization, emerging
spontaneously from an initial state of uniformityl regulates the manner
in which the system functions and persists in time (it is stable) for as
long as the difference in temperature betwen the two surfaces of the
hquid remains more or less constant. At a point of instability, a new
went occurs that can be described by a bifurcation diagram (Fig.6). A
stable branch of evolution of the system is abandoned in favor of a new
stable branch. The choice of one of two possible stable branches at a
fork depends on small local fluctuations. In the transition from a
condition of absence of motion (velocity a = 0) to a condition of motion
of water molecules (velocity w # 01, these fluctuation decide, for
example, whether w < 0 or t~ > Ol on the basis of the direction of rotation
of the cells. Amplification of a fluctuation by nonlinear rela-ps
generates new spatial and tamporal organizationzhat remains a b l e for
as long as certain conditions are maintainedand until a further p k of
instability occurs with a new bifurcation.

Figure 6: Bifurcation diagram.


City out of chaos

We discllzssed BQlard cells to provide a simple illustration of a


spontaneous transition from chaos to order in a far-from-equilibrium
system.. Curiously, Nicolis and kigogine describe self-organization in
l%nard c& from the point of view of a thy observer charged with
observing the formation of cells from the inside. They are like architects
who descend to the work plane to peer inside their scale models. To
define the cmBi&n of a system in equilibrium, a ho~~l~gmeous state in
which all parks are identical, Uley write:
A tiny o b m r would not be able to tell, @m looking around him,
whether he is in tiny volume V, or Vb of the @id. All the volumes
that can be arbitrarily defined in the fluid are indistinguishable and
knowledge of the state of one of them is sufficient to know the state of
all of them, irrespective of their form or size. In other words, @m
out okmer's point of view, the position he occupies does not make
the difirence. Alternatively, there is no intn'mic way for him k,
perceive the notion of space; [...I not only does the hmogeneity of the
fluid make it impossible@ him to gain an intrinsic concept of space,
but also the stability of the equilibrium state makes all spaces
identical. It is therefore impossiblefir him to have an intrinsic idea of
time. It is impossible to talk of 'behaviour' of a system in such a simple
situation.
Moving away from the state of equilibrium, the story changes
radically for our tiny observer in the liquid. When the difference
in temperature reaches the instability point and goes beyond, the
system takes a new form. It is then possible to distinguish a befme and
an *.
At his level, the universe has been completely transformed For
example, he can establish where he is and where he isn't by observing
the direction of rotation of the cell he occupies. By counting the
number of cells he goes through as he moves, he can acquire a notion
of space. Broken symmetry is the name we give to this appearanct
of tha notion of space in a system in which the notion of space m l d
not previously be perceived intrinsically. In some ways, broken
symmetry leads us ffom a static, geometric view of space to an
Aristotelian v i m in which space is modelled by the functions
occurring in the system.
Figure 7 : A tiny observer in the Benard cells drawn like a Le Courbusier
modulor (our elaboration).

This change from an initial equilibrium state to a condition of


non-equilibrium enables us to distin&tush the parts of the system, to
orientate ourselves, to recognize and measure space. The tiny observer
can swim in the system and acquire information, all the time knowing
where he is going. When he is between two cells, he can state
univocally to be going to the left or right cell, whereas before convection
currents were established (thermodynamic equilibrium) he could not
identdy his position with certainty. Thus the transition to a steady state
coincided with the appearance of additional information that we can
express in terms of probability. In the initial equilibrium condition,
there was a 1:2 correspondence between the observer's position and the
two parts of the fluid;he had the same probability of being in the right
or the left cell and he could not therefore determine his position
with certainty. Now, in non-equilibrium state, there is a univocd 1:l
correspondence, which means certainty.

From cells to tropical storms

The transition from chaos to order and the appearance of dissipative


structures is a fascinating aspect of evolutionary science. It is easy to
imagine how Pngogine's observations and those of the Brussels school
inspired a new phase of scientific research into complex system and
City out of dams

processes of self-organization proliferating in the real world, Iike


mginifestations of the creativity of nature. Nicolis and Prigogine3
describe a simple wmple. A clubic -c of wabuc at ambient
t3empmture is lchar- by disoE~molscuZarm.liosm(-
n m & m ) . W @ ~ ~ o f a ~ ~ s t i e , n n , t l h e ~ c u W ~
ofw&m kto a ~ a ~ ~ & ~ f O E P l
Whew does this speeial aptihvde of systems come h m ? How can
complex behavior be observed and its dynamics defined?
According to Nicolis and Prigoginq '"he most rennarkable aspeet of
this sudden transition from simple to complex behavior is the order and
coherence of the system.' A simple case such as the formation of B&nard
cells~manys~of~spon~transiCon.Thecauseof
the fomticm of ordered structurm should be sought in the tramition
from a set of h d e s l y , & m d elements, in*&& cd each
~,toasysQmof~ela~inwhich$rep~areinsynbiQsis
and coialesce into a whole. R e k A h g on Bhard instability, Nicolis and
Rigqgm csberwd 'Beyond the threshold AT, ihhp happen as if each
W d m w e r e djSermng the behavior o f i t s ~ b o r s i norder to
play its rob and take part in the whole.' The appear- of long-range
co&- (in the Bt"tnad expe&mat, the cells am of the order of a
..
nulbmkv, cm) with respect to the range of -ni forms

organbation a motor p o w 4 by an a&ml source of energy that is


used iro fonn ordered F & U and ~ then dbipa$ed. According t o
Gr@am Nicolis? ' O r g ~ o emerges
n on a macrtxcopic space-time
scale that is many times bigger than mirroscopic intexacrtians letmen
the elements.'
Complex behavior and complex systems appear because af Che
existence of relations between the parts, The nature of these relations
and their intensity debermines the degree of intadepndence bpt.wem

3 Nicolle BE Prigogine, op.dt


4Nicalis, G.,Physics of far-kom-aqui],ibriu m
sya.tems and selfaganbation. 17se New
Physics, ed, P.Davies, Cambridge University Press: New Yo& 1989.
thepartsan8wMertheeffectsof a p e r t u r b a ~ e v e n i n a ~ d
sector, propagate bo mu& or dl of the ayst;ezn arrsl thus occur on a
large wale, h other won%, application of a perturbation can cause
dispropartioa efh36; tilerhere is no h @ mrelati-p with the M a
irnpyzlse. N&&q is e consequence d relations between elements
of the system, which at a critical pint of instability, may activate
feedbacks, amplllyulg the action of a perturbation rather than
absorbing the &&, as occurs under stable conditions. Pritjof Capra5
obmved that instabilities and leaps to new fomm of organization
are the result of fluctuatim amplified by positive feedbdc loops.
Feedback that amplifies was considered destructive in cybernetics,
a science concerned with neural schemes of comm.uslication and
control, but is a s m c e of new order and complexity in dissipative
structure theory.
h a r d h y ~ ~is acsimple s case but d.km a key. to many
natural processes. Cmvati~ncuu~enbin o c e w and tropld storms
are exaonpb l d the formation of dbipabive dynamic Wwtwes, like
the tiny T 3 t h - d ceJh h t with a diffmmt order d mgnaYud~,

(
Katrina T&i& d w w W Bkw m1- in Il* m,
fxxqwuhg ithe

debertRdvm*.m*tron-ht
b&mm 23 and 30 August suddenly 101weredsea s& WnperaRlres.
T h e N ~ A ~ ~ o ~ , ' H ~ w l n B m ~ l o J r t h e
hegt~af~oclean,so&eweslniscooledots~hrxrricanepasses.'
The energy extracted powers the winds.

5 Capra, F., 2% WbofLi$. Anchor: New York, 1996.


City out of chaos

Figure 8: Sea surface temper* showing low temperatures left by the passage
of cyclone Katrina from 23 to 30 August 2005. Gray color of the sea
indicates high sea surface temperature. The sequence of images of
the clouds is superimposed on the sea to show cyclone position. After
passage of We cyclone, white patches of sea are visible, indicaiing
local low temperature. Temperatures were dekdd by AMSR-E
instnunents of the Aqua satellite; cloud images were recorded by
GOES12 satellite (link for video:http://svs.pfc~pv/goto?3222).
Or&t 'out of chaos

The sequence of images recorded by satellite shows that the energy of


the ocean is a n engines that induces water vapor molecules to organize
in a structure similar to the convection vortices observed by B6nard,
once an instability threshold is crossed. This organization is powered by
thermal energy accumulated by high sea surface temperatures and
dissipates energy with a high entropy content as kinetic energy of wind
and rain. The formation of internal coherence, a negentropic structure,
is compensated by an increase in disorder and chaos on the outside,
which in the case of a cyckme may be enormous.

rigure 3: I ~ d a l on
l me ocean from 23 to 30 August 2005 during passage
of cyclone Katrina. Data based on Tropical Rainfall Measuring
Mission (TRMM) Multisatellite Precipitation Analysis (link for
video: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?3221).
City out of chaos

Climate

In July 2002,74 mayors of coastal cities throughout the world (includmg


Venice, Rio de Janeiro, Oslo, Capetown, Fukuoka, Dakar, Dubai,
Honolulu, Nadi-Fiji Tallinn, Dhaka-Bangladesh, Rome, Boston, Landon,
and San Francisco) signed an open letter to President George W. Bush,
asking the USA to ratify the protocol of Kyoto. Marc H. Morial, mayor
of New Orleans, was among them. Coastal cities, seaboard civilizations
dating back thousands of years, showed their anxiety about the once
benevolent sea. Why was this appeal ignored with such insouciance? It
was based not only on widely suppoled scientific theories but above all
on the intuition developed by thousands of years of history of c d
civiliaaticms and the @;xperienmof generations. In our opinion,it is source
of great worry that cities founded and developing on the sea now feel
threatened by the sea and need to defend themselves.
The Fourth Rssessment Report of the Intergmernmental Panel on
Clirmxte Clzangeo, a body awarded the Nobel Peace Prize with
A1 Gore in 2007, documents the main measurable environmental.trends
and describes advances in understanding of the natural and man-made
causes of climate change. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide
((2%) i n e r e d from 280 ppm in 1750 to 379 ppm in 2005. Recent
research on ice cores confirms that atmospheric concentratioz~sof CCh
have not been so high in the last 650,000 years. The rate at which COz
concentrations have been increasing has accelerated in the last 10 years,
rising from 1.4 ppm/year in 1960-2005 to 1.9 ppm/year in 1995-2005.
The temperature inerease in the period 1906-2005 was 0.74"C,
compared to 0.6"C in the period 1901-2001. By the end of the century
the temperature of the surface of the Earth is likely to increase by
2.0-4.5OC. The increase is greater at high latitudes. Since 1978, satellite
estimates show that the surface area of Arctic ice has decreased by
2.7% every decade. Warming tends to reduce C02 absorbing capacity
of land and oceans, increasing the fraction of man-made emissions
remaining in the atmosphere: another source of feedback.
O r h out of chaos 43

Between 1961 and 2003, world sea levels have risen by about
1.8 mm/year. This rate accelerated to 3.1 mm/year in the period
1993-2003. The total rise amounts to 17 cm due to an increase in the
mean temperature of the oceans down to depths of about 3000 m and
is estimated to reach 19-58 cm by 2100.
Meteorological observations have shown long-term trends in
precipitation from 1900 to 2005 in large areas ofthe planet: increasing
rainfd in eastem North and South America and northern and central
Asia, increased drought in the Sahel, Medimanean, southan Africa,
and parts of southern Ash.The frequency of intense rain has generally
increased. The M e d i m m a n is one of the mas most sLw3ep11ble to
such trends.
In 2004, an mprecedented series of cyclones struck Florida and
ten tropical storms devastated Japan (the prwious record was six). This
prompted Kerry Emamel? climatologist at the Massachusetts Institube
of Technolow, to do a retrospective quantification of cyclone force,
combining parameters such as duration and intensity. He found that
since the seventies, the power dissipated by cyclones has more than
doubled in the north Atlantic and increased by up to 75%in the Pacific.
In both cases a clear correspondence with increase in sea surface
temperature was evident, and in general with the overall temperature
of the troposphere. This seems to confirm the hypothesis of an
increasing trend According to Emanuel,' 'Global mod& of climate
show a potential substantial increase in intensity with inaeasing man-
made global warnring, leading to a prediction of progressive increase in
intensity of cyclones with respect to the present.' At the same time,
Kevin TrrnberthP meteorologist at the National Center for Atmospheric
Research ( N W ) , obmmd that the mean increase in sea surface

Emamel, KA, haeasing destructiveness oftropical cyclones over the past 30 years.
Nature, 436"pp. 886-688, M105.
7Emanuel, KA., The dependence of hunicane intensity on climate. N a f u ~32~ 6,
pp.483-485,1987.
'Tredxrth, K, Uncertainty in huiricanes and global warming. Scienoe, 308,
pp. 1753-1754,2005.
City out of chaos

temperature (which was O.lC in the decade 1995-2W), associated


with an increase in water vapor in the lower troposphere (which has
increased by 1.3% every 10 years over oceans since 1988), favors the
formation of storms and hurricanes. Indeed, warmer sea surface waters
and increased water vapor provide more energy and matter for stonns
that power hurricanes. According to Trenberth, the man-made effects of
climate change are now evident in hurricane zones, especially tropical
ocean basins, and we can expect these changes to affect the intensity
and precipitations of hurricanes.
Data of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA) confirm,that since 1995, hurricanes have been more intense
and have progressively increased in frequency. This greater intensity
is partly an effect of natural multidecade oscillations that can be
observed in hurricane statistics, and partly due to climatic warming
that aggravates environmental conditions. The statistics show than
from 1995 to 2005, there were 13.6 tropical storms, 7.7 hurricanes, and
3.6 violent hurricanes per year. In the previous period (1970-1995)
there were only 8.6 tropical storms, 5 hurricanes, and 1.7 violent
hurricanes per year. The existence of a correlation with the increase in
CO.2 emissions is a hypothesis shared by the international scientific
community and is assumed as the basis for global political action and
programs such as the protocol of Kyoto.
All these theories, sustained by a long series of observations and
experimental data, lead to the theme of the complexity of real systems,
from small scalea to the whole biosphere. The problem of climate
change is related to the self-organizing properties of the climate system
and with the presence of weak local perturbations. Many skeptics ask
how such an essential role in the world climate crisis can be attributed
to such a small variation in a single atmospheric gas (the 0.032% rise in
CO.2 concentrations).
In a recent novel, Michael Crichton, well-known American writer
of best sellers, sustains an unusual thesis in an attempt to demonstrate
that climate change is an illusion artfully set up by ecologists, a sect of
Or& out of a f s 45

unscrupulous businessmen with enormous economic interests. The


main characters of the story, Sf& ofFear,9 set out to demonstrate with
statistics and quotes from authoritative scientific texts that global
warming is an ecological fraud to the detriment of oil magnates. In a
conversation between two characters aimed at persuading the reader of
this sinister plot, Crichton points out that the quantity of is a
insigdicant with respect to other gases in the atmosphere. Jennifer, one
of the two characters, compares the composition of the atmosphere to
an American footballfleld.
Most of the a h o q h r e is nitrogen. So, startingfiom the goal line,
nitmpn takes yw all the way to the seventy-erght-yard line. And
most of what's k$ is oxygen. O q p t&s you to the nineq-nine-
yard line. Only one yard to go. But most of what remains is the inerE
gas argon. Argon brings you within three and a half inches of the goal
line. T%at's pretty much the thickness of the chalk strip, plks. And
hoev m&q t h t remaining Wwee inches is carbon dimOXI&?One fsnch.
That's how much CQa we have in our a m h e r e . One in& in a
hdmd-yard footMIjlieid C..] You are told that carbon dioxide has
increased in the last fijy yeam. DO you know how much it has
increased, on arrfwtball fild? It has increased by three-eiihths of an
inch - less than the thickness 4 a pencil. It's a lot m e carbon
dioxide, but it's a minuscule charge in our total atmosphere. Yet you
are asked to believe that this tiny change has d y i m the entire planet
into a dangerous warming pattern.
This is exactly what climate experts sustain. The way to obsenre
the effects of a small perturbation on a complex system is to have a
view of the set of relations linking all the elements and to see that
nonlinearity may amplify a small fluctuation, modifying the behavior
of the whole system. Scientists agree that the world climatic system is
a complex system. An mbkmatic case is the famous example of
complexity formulated by Edward Lorenz10 in 1972 when he asked

Crichton, M.,State of Fear. Harper Collins:New York,2004.


E.,Predictability:Dws the Flap of a Butwy's Wings in Brazil Set offa Tornado in
18 Lorenz,
Texas? Talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Washington
Dc,1972.
City out of chaos

whether the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in


Texas. He was obviously referring to the nonlinear relations typical of
atmospheric dynamics.
We have to change point of view and get away from a purely
quantitative reductionist perspective. Through the perspectives of
evolutionary physics and chaos theory, it is possible to see that a
variation in a critical parameter (such as temperature for Benard cells)
can generate instability in an open dissipative system, such as the
biosphere and the climate system, activating adaptations or in extreme
cases self-organination. Many processes of the global climate system
are subject to fluctuations. The progressive increase in atmospheric
concentrations of C02 beyond a certain threshold can make these
processes sensitive to perturbationsI even weak local ones, and make
the system behave in new ways. The hurricane intensity and frequency
data indicates that the instability point of hurricane formation is
exceeded more often than in the past.
A new alliance between humans and nature can be built on this
awareness. Ecological knowledge is based on the observation of the
existence of complex behaviors; this is a starting point. Trying to
understand the relations and processes is the next step. We have many
tools with which to obseme these phenomena and many others need to
be developed. These tools must combine quantitative and qualitative
aspects, focusing on the relations between the various parts of systems
and their dynamics. As Fritjof Capra observed, survival of humanity
will depend on our ecological competence, our capacity to understand
the principles of ecology and to live accordingly.
To return to the football field, it is unthinkable to reason only in
terms of area, ignoring factors essential for playing a game, such as
the rulesI the meaning of chalk lines on the field, tactics, and past
matches. Those who have watched a match know that two teams of
players on the field and a hundred thousand spectators inciting them
are focused on getting a player with the ball over the chalk line at the
end of the field, even by ha2fa inch.
Networks

Suspended cities
If you choose to believe me, good. Now I will tell how Octavia, the
spider-web city, is made. [...] This is the fbundation of the city: a net
which serves as passage and support. All the rest, instead of rising up,
is hung below: rope ladders, hammocks,houses made like sacks, clothes
hngers, terraces like gondolas, skins of water, gas jets, spits, baskets
on strings, dumbwaiters, showers, trapezes and rings fbr children's
games, cab& cars, chandeliers, pots with trailing plants.
Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia's inhabitants is less
uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will last only so long,
In this invisible city there is everything. There are houses, resources
such as water and gas, communications, mechanized structures, plants,
and games. All is connected and suspended from a web. Perhaps
Ottavia exists and is a unique city that lives hanging from a tough
spider web, or perhaps not. What is certain is that all cities resemble
Wvia in some way: they are all intent on remaining suspended, on
hanging on to the fabric of the web and on weaving new webs. We
believe that the global web that sustains the cities of the world has a
consistency, even though it is invisible like Calvino's cities. We cannot
see it but we know that every day we hang on it. We do not h o w who
wove the web or what it is attached to or how it is made. We do not
know its loading capacity, though we know a limit exists.
City out of chaos

The web of life

Fritjof Capral described the formation of functional networks in nature,


that is networks of relations between different processes, seeking to
emphasize the determinant role of relations between constitutional
elements of a system in self-organizing processes. In considering this
aspect for far-from-equilibrium systems, he stated that networks are
the main scheme of organization of all living systems. For example,
ecosystems are interpreted as food webs, processes in which wastes of
one organism are food for others; organisms in turn are networks of cells
and cells are networks of molecules in which chemical reactions generate
biological structures such as protieins, enzymes, and membranes, and
maintain them in time,repairing and regenerating them. Living networks
create and recreate themselves, transforming or substituting their
components. Despite the incessant structural changes that occur, the
fundamental scheme of the network is preserved.
In all these cases, the network is always a non-material scheme of
relations. Capra underlines this aspect as a discontinuity with respect
to the traditional reductionist approach by saying that although all
living organisms consist of atoms and molecules, it is not true that
they are 'nothing but' atoms and molecules. He explains that there is
something else that characterizes life, something non-material and
non-reducible: a scheme of organization.
The organization of a system is added information that cannot be
seen by observing the parts. There are clear examples in nature of
groups of agents that pursue a plan and by adapting to each other,
transcend themselves and acquire collective properties that do not
exist for individuals. Organisms that adapt by coevolution until they
form an ecosystem are an example.
Moreover, in a complex system, the organization that emerges
spontaneously is not imposed from above by a preconstituted plan.

' Capra, F., The Web of Lijk Anchor: New York, 19%.
The single elements do not decide the overall profile on the basis
of a common plan. The behavior of single elements can wen be
individualistic and egoistic, as sustained by NicoW in his law of least
resistance, according to which every constituent strives for its own
welfare and for maximum benefit from minimum expenditure of
energy. The interations between constituents of the system, which are
neither isolated nor free, trigger a process of progressive mutual
adaptation; each individual performs actions and reactions in b e with
actions and reactions of other individuals. This process, generated by
the cooperation and competition of the constituents, each intent on
pursuing its own interests, does not cease until an organization
that guarantees harmonious and non-conflictual interaction between
individuals is achieved with respect to stimulation from outside.
For a more intuitive description of this cooperation between
constituents, Prigogine and Stengers used their famous example of
the termite hill built by a population of thousands of termites.
Although construction is not guided by a director of works, it
culminates in a structure that may have different forms but is
always solid, functional, and coherent. The work of termites is not
so distant from processes observed in a human community. The
example of the interaction of thousands of specimens that build a
termite hill is clearly a simplification that leads to a question: is
there analogy between biological and social systems?
In a lecture organized by the Italian Institute of Bioarchitedue in
the Salone del Cinquecento, Palazzo Vecchio, florence, Fritjof Capra
observed:
Even social life can be considered in terms of networks. However,
in this case the processes are not chemical but processes of
communication. Living networks in human communities are networks
of communication. Like biological networks, social networks are
self-generating, but most of what they produce is not material. Each

Nicob, G., Physica of far-fromecpilibrium systems and self-organization The New


Physics, e d P. Davies, Cambridge University Press: NewYork, 1989.
City out of chaos

communication produces thoughts and meanings that produse other


cmnmunications. In this way, the whole network produces itself.
% dimension of meaning is crucial for understanding social
networks. Even when they generate material structures - goods,
manufictures, wonks tf art - these s t m c t u ~ sare v q d t ~ r e n t f r m
hose produced by biologiml nehuorkdi, T h y are generally praduced
& a pu'pose, according ta a plrm, and they embody meaning.
The more wmmunications proceed in a social network, the more
they fimn fiedbacks that end up pducing a system of belieB,
explamtions, cmmm values; a m m o n horizon of m ' n g , known as
culhzre, fed by jkrther contmunicntjon. nanrgh this culture, single
indiddwls acquh their identity as members ofthe social network and
thus the network generates its own borders.
We cmz t h e e r e compare biological netzaorks with social wtwolJcs
to see similarities and dijhmes. Biological networks operate in the
material d, socid miworks ope& in the dimension of meaning.
Both produrn material sbudum and social networks tzlso produce
the immaterr'al structures of culture: values, rules of conduct, common
knowledge and soforth.
Biological systems exchange moLcuLs in the networks ofchmicd
processes; sod systems exchange i.rlfbmraM and &as in the network
of orymnicaticms. A biological ndzoo?Jr produces atd sustains a
material border that gives it identity; a social network produces and
sustains cultural borders that in a similar way give the sararalsystem or
the human community its identity.
In his research, Capra considered similarities and differences between
biological and sacial networks as a central part of a new scientific
interpretation of life. His aim was not solely to offer a unified view of
lifeIthe mind and society, but also to develop a coherent and systematic
approach to critical problems of our time.

Return to the Aristotdian city


These refkctiom of networks are a simpMcationthat help apprehend the
complexity of the processes underlying life and the evohrtion of dynamic
system such as human systems, society, and cities. In pradice, this
transition may be less immediate than it seems, but can offer stimulusfor
Networks

ideas that will unfold in the pages of this book. Let us therefore make a
jump from theory to practice and try to find a key for an elaboration of
the concepts of complexity, self-organization, and chaos in regional
disciplines such as urban studies and town planning. What novelties can
we expect from an approach based on thesepresuppositim?
According to Marcello Cini,3 the culture of mechanism has so far
played a major role as interpretative model of cities and their growth in
modern town plammg. 'The world view of this culture sees a mosaic of
more or less complicated interdependent parts, each of which can be
analyzed for its own sake in t e r n of its constituents and the forces that
hold them together, irrespective of context or environment'.
In this extremely reductive picture, cities consist of many easily
identified pieces, for example the ones we see on land-use charts,
divided into homogeneous functional areas with exact borders. We
can therefore reject the analytical reductionist view of Descartes in
favor of the systemic holistic view of Pascal in the field of regional
sciences, as was done for evolutionary sciences.
This involves proposing a distinction that has always been quite
clear in history, between two concepts of land, sustaining one or the
other of two opposites, as noted by Franco Farinelli.4 He first mentions
a definition of city attributed to Aristotle: 'Cities were born to preserve
life; they exist so that men can live well,' then he adds:
Until the end of the 16th anhtry, this concept held sway. l3e treatise
that gaae rise to modem theory of cities, Gimanm Botm's On the
causes ofthe size ofcities (1598)begins: 'City means a grouping ofmen,
brought together in order to live well' [...] But in the 18th century, the
idea of city was transfimd: it no longer meant humans but things:
houses [...I The definition of city became the one we know, the
llluminist &$nition in the Encyclope'die:a ' p u p of houses arranged
along streets and surrounded by a common element, a wall around
districts, streets, public squares and other buildings.' [...I Read this

Cini, M., Un parndiso perduto. Feltrinelli: Roma,1994.


Ftlrinelli, F., Geograjb. Einaudi: Vicenza, 2005.
City out of chos
Qefnition again. I t is the exact definition of a town map and its
mechanism of scale excludes humans.

Regional syskms and networks

Reformation of town planning ixtstnments in Europe in the 1990s, for


example with the introduction of strategic and structural planning,

'Krier, L.,The reconstruction of the European city. Leon Krier: Drawings, &chives
dlArchitedureModem: Brussels, 1980.
Networks

represents an advance towards understanding or me complexity of


regional and urban systems. This intention manifested in regulatims
that expound the reasons and procedures of so-called strategic plans on
different scales. They promote integration of different competences and
transverse actions in different se&rs in regional plans; they sustain the
need to consider feasibility and sustainability and hence the durability
of interventions; they identdy the aim of planning that integrates
the spatial aspects of regional planning with temporal parameters of
implementation and management; they introduce preventive integrated
assessment procedures of the effects of plans and programs on the
environment and resources in the short and long periods.
Investigating the feasibility of the new regional programming and
planning, Roberto Mascarucci6 gathered various interesting reflections
on the appropriateness of building a systemic view of regions through
perception of a reticular scheme.
The latest generation of strategic planning has been defined as reticular,
alluding to the decisional mock1 that increasingly configures as a
network module in which agents mediate and negotiate in di-t
ways, and to the increasing interpretative importance of the paradigm of
the network organization of taons that provides interesting cues fbr
redefining pla&ing practi&. [...] In thk past, building &ang 8 o m
regional surmrrdings; today the 'sense of pkce' +ds on other
relations (or no longer depends on any physical relationship): regional
relatimships are increasingly immaterial and material relationships
have expanded (in relation to the above long networks); in this
problematical new dimension, the location of any operation and its
physical-spatial configuration with respect to the logic of a vaster scale
(which changes at great sped) is justified [...] Dissolution of cities in
regional networks modifies the role of urban sites, that become a
firnction of the position of the place in the network, of its possible
interconnections, and ofvariation 4 these two variables in time.
Reference to a paradigm of the organization of urban systems in
networks is a cardinal point for understanding the evolutionary and
dynamic properties we observe in contemporary cities. By virtue of this

Mascarucd, R., Nuova programmazione e progetti di fen+torio. Saia: Pescara, 2000.


City out of chaos

interpretation,the new regional programming practicesIan indispensable


operative link between planning and the world of evolving systems, have
increasing credit with respect to traditional methods. Again, the time
fador is an important turning point According to Mascarucci, the task of
new regional progranuning is to plan the r e g i d strategies to adivaie
mechanisms of Sustaiplable devdopment in local systems, in order to
create network synergies between them and to respond to the demand
for local development with an eye to global conditions.
l*his is why it is necessary to collocate the place in the ikmporal and spatial
contat b&m elabomting development projects. It is mandatory to
imagine the nao rule that the place will taka in relation to network trends
and coUocate the wed in this mlmng framework, because when
nehuork geometry changes, the sense of plaae changes and there^%^ also
the 'demad' to in-. It is a h impatrmt to define the scales, sectws
and spheres of intetjimce of the place with the r e g i d context, or
possible connections of the intervention with the system of supmlod
networks, b e m e any opmtion generates multiple relationships with the
system of networks it belongs to. The regional prol'ect (mare fhan the
project in the region] Utus becomes the pnject of the p b connected to the
vmkbk geometry of systems of relationshrps with which it interfkces;it is
there&? nemsmily multiscale, bebecause places establish multiple relations
with their contat and converse on many scales.
Through a systemic view of regions and networks of short- and
long-distance relationships, urban systems acquire the characteristics
of complexity and indeterminatenessI like biological systems. New
instruments and new planning procedures are needed to understand
these syskms. Like science, urban disciplines could be reformed to use
a new paradigmatic approach to interpret the world. The approach is
antithetical to traditional schemes and calls for new awareness of our
complex, dynamic, evolving world. New projects and the procedures
for evaluating their effeds should not simply impose forms or
geometries but propose solutions that provide an opportunity for
integrating different disciplines and developing new activities.
More than anything, regional planrung needs new tools for studying
networks of regional proceases and for identifying principlesl trends, and
gemad behaviors. A ~presentationof re@mal s~rsbemsthat shows
matmid n m m , such as flows of energy,maZlerialsI and persons, and
immaW relations, such as flows of infomation, is needed to observe
the~~ti~anddynslnoi~9ofthesesysbems.Wedto
u n d e r d the current meaning af local mtextf in the sense of a node in
local and global netsvorks that oqpnize a a m A fullerundemtanding
of thee dynamic n&w&ks, which has much to do with systems ecology,
is a pmequbk forg-p coherent md durable new prcmwes
and spatial c ~ a t i o mIn. othm words, the new town project must be
a 'placef rather than a 'space' project that tackles the complexity d the
evolving context and consciausly chooses the role that a place can play
mst&mbly in a r@m.

Time is real and space is relative?


Living on this planet involves a continuous search for an alliance
between humans and naturef as hoped for by Prigogine and Stengers. It
involves a search for awareness of thoughts and of the consequences of
actionsf starting with the great common collective project of the region
down to small daily gestures of individuals. The concepts of ecology
and sustainability derived from the science of relations and complexity
go in this direction. To live means to choose how to actuate these
relations in space and time. In the last 20 years, evolutionary sciences
and the environmentalcrisis have transformed the meaning of living in
time and space, or rather inhabiting time and space.
Prigogine showed that time is real and not relative. Time is in matter,
in the world of things, it is an integral part of biological evolution. Our
lives cannot be sustained by atemporal deterministic laws but are
immersed in the flow of timef in constant relation with memory of the
past, and projection into the future. To 'live in timef means acting aware
of the flow of events and forms, of the evolutionary and stochastic nature
of this flow, of its irreversibility, of the indeterminatenessf of the
complexityf and of the wonderful history of the biosphere. Even our
City out of chaos

leaning processes and thought formation are part of this evolving


universe.'Int.ermal time1 is expressed concretely in in of relations,
stored information, and historical dimension. The effects of the d e s t
material change are never cancelled, but are somehow perpehlated so
that no action may occur in physical, moral, or Medualnature without
leaving all matter in a state different from that in which it would have
been had the action not occurred. According to George Perkins Marsh? a
pioneer of ecological thought, there is an indelible permanent record of
every ad, word, desire, proposal, and thought conceived by mortals.
Time is a key concept of sustainabilityand ecology. The irreversibihy of
time charges us with the great nqmmitriliry of 'living in time,' respecting
evolution, reconcilinghist~ricaltime (that of humans consuming resouroes)
with biological time (that of nature regenerating those resources) and
exploring the paths of creativity.
Similarly, the perception of space has changed and is now multiple,
multiscale, artidated in networks of material and, immaterial relations.
The world manifests as a complex set of relations, networks having their
o m spatlotemporal dimension and self-organization. Regional syst-eam
are structured on many organizational levels, have unclear borders and
host processes that in many cases have a global dimension and are part of
a network of relations distributed in space that affect other regions.
In this new perception, it is paradoxically space that becomes relative,
sometimes exceeding its physical consistency and artisulating or almost
dissolving in a complex web of networks of relations. Place or a system of
places only has arbitrary, relative borders; any gesture is involved in a
chain of processes and nonlinear relations, the only imghle limit of
which is the physical limit of the whole biosphere. Today, to "live in
space' implies choosing complexity, not only as a study topic but also as a
study method for understandmg fhe multidimensionality and integrating
totality of the real world and its evolutionary nature.

Marsh, G.P., M h n andNature. Harvard Univeraiiy Press: Cambridge, 1865.


Flows and stocks

Giles Revel1 and Matt WiUey (Studio 8) created a series of images


to sustain the activity of the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) for a
program called At this rate, aimed at increasing awareness of the rapid
destruction of our rainforests, through art and other means. The poster
shows the metamorphosis of the plan of a city into the structure of a leaf
and expresses the ratio of forest to city at world level in termsof area:
m y second we lose an area the size of afootball pitch. E v e y minute
we lose an area 20 times the size of 7'he Sydney Opera House. Every
hour we lose an area the size of Central London. Evey day we lose an
area larger than all jive boroughs of New York City. E v e y week we
lose an area 21 times the size of Paris. Every month we lose an area
102 times the size of Barcelona. Eve y year we lose an area three times
the size of Sri Lanka.
Data of the FA01 Global Forest Resources Assessment (2005) confinns this
trend. Net world loss of forest, mainly in Africa and South America, is
proceeding at a rate of 73 million hectares per year, which is particularly
alarrmng if one considers that forest biomass is a stock of 283 billion tons
of carbon (much more than the carbon in the atmosphere). At the same

1 FAO, Global Forest Resources Assessment. Food and Agriculture Organization of the
United Nations: Rome,2005.
City out of chaos

time, the W World Urbanization Prospects (2006) publishes statistics on


the growth of world population and cities. At the start of the twentieth
century world population was 1.6 billion. At the start of the twenty-first
century it was 6.1 billion In 2007, it was 6.6 billion Five percent of the
world population lives in cities having populations of more than ten
million, 14% in cities of 1-10 million, 30% in cities with less than one
million persons,and 51%in nualareas. In 2009, more thanhalf the world
population will live in aties. According to UN estimates, cities with less
than 500,000 persons will grow the most. Globally, population growth
will occur exclusively in cities, especially in Asia, Africa, and Latin
America. Though slower, the growth trends of the world's big cities
are also significant, especially in developing countries. In 1950, the three
largest aties were New York - Newark (12.3 million), Tokyo (11.3
million), and London (8.4 million). In 2015, the three biggest cities are
predicted to be Tokyo with 35.5 million, Mumbai with 2l.9 million, and
Mexico City with 21.6 million. In 2030, almost two-thirds of world
population will live in cities3
All this suggests the need to formulate new strategies of city
management. The inestimable value of the world's cities lies in their
extraordinary richness of forms, cultures, diversity, creativity, and
beauty, but this heritage is supported by the global environmental
system. Forest and city, bios and oikos, are two entities linked by
a network. Awareness of this is the only possible key to ensure
conditions suitable for the life of natural ecosystems and the cities that
depend on them. Today, it is impossible not to wonder what feeds
and provides vital lymph to the global tree that has cities as leaves.
Cities breathe like leaves, though in a different manner. Cities grow
by storing resourcesas buildings, roads, infrastntcture, and technologies.
They absorb flows of energy and matter to build and maintain ordered

2 United Nations, World Urbanization Pmspects: The 2005 M s i o n . United Nations: New
York, 2006.
3 Haub, C.,2007World Population Data Sheet. Population Reference Bureau: Washington
Dc,2007.
Flows and stocks 59

functional structures. Cities are crisscrossed by networks of energy,


water, gas, and information, Eke fine capluanes. Their networks draw
fn>m many sources and absorb in order to store, replace, repair, and
consume. Other equally important networks dissipate. The wastes of
cities are emitted and dispersed in the atmosphere, so5 and water and
return to their sources.

Figure 10: Poster by G. Revel1 and M. Willey (Studio 8) for the RAN project
At this rate (www.ran.org).

Let us consider London. The project City Limits4 estimated the


population of Greater London at 7.4 million in 2000. Every year,

4E@F, City Limits: A Resource Flow and Ecological Footprint Analysis of Greater London. Best
Foot Forward Ltck London,2002
City out of chaos

Londoners consume 154,000 GWh of electrical energy equivalent to 13


million tons of oil, emitting 41 million tons of COz; they use 49 million
tons of materials and produce 26 million tom of wastes; they consume
6.9 million tons of f w d and more than 80%is imported from outside
the UK. They consume 870,000 million liters of water. The ecological
footprint of London is 49 million global hectares which is 42 times its
biocapacity.
The leaves of trees fall to the ground like wastes and return part
of their organic matter to the soil. They make little noise while
maintaining a cycle in which entropy increases as little as possible.
But cities are not leaves. Where do the wastes and emissions of cities
go? When is rubbish waste and when is it a resource? How much
energy do growing cities need? What are the sources of all this energy
and which sources are unlimited or renewed? How much noise do the
cycles that feed and sustain cities make, cycles in which entropy
increases fast?

A model of flows from source to sink

Interpretation of cities as dissipative structures on a regional d e implies


relations between systems involved in a network of processes stretching
in all directions. As we mentioned in the second chapter, cities are
physical syskms in contact with various sources and sinks; matter and
energy flow through them from the sources to the sinks. This definition
findstheoretical confirmation in Harold Morowitz's simple description of
far-from-equilibrium systems5 He showed a system intermediate
between a hot energy source and a heat sink, where energy flowed
spontaneously from the hot source to the cold sink.

5 Morowitz, H.J., Energy Row in Biology. Ox Bow Press:Woodbridge, 1979.


Flms arid stocks

Let us consider two processes: (1)heat exchange between source and


sink; and (2) self-organization in the intermediate system. By the
second principle of thermodynamics, the overall change in entropy of
the system is always positive:
ds,, + dsa r o PI
where S, is the entropy of 'source + sink' and Sint is the entropy of the
intermediate system. Considered on its own, the flow of energy from
the source to the sink always involves an increase in entropy.
dSss> 0 PI
We know that for dissipative structures, the intermediate system can
organize itself in ordered structures which it maintains in a steady
state in t h e . Thus, the entropy of the intermediate system may
decrease subject to the constraint (second principle) that its variation
be compensated by a positive variation in entropy of the external
environment 'source + sink':
-ds,, Ids, [31
The entropy of the intermediate system may decrease ifthere is a flow
of energy. The entropy of the universe can only increase. The
flow from the source to the sink provides the intermediate system
with continuous energy that enables creation of far-from-equilibrium
states or states far from thermal death. If left to itself, the ordered
state of a biological system, an ecosystem or a city would decay into
disorder and chaos. This is why work is continually needed to order
the system; because there must always be a spontaneous flow of
energy, there must always be a gradient.
In an emblematic case, the intermediate system in the flow diagram
is the biosphere. The surface of the Earth (intermediate system) receives
a flow of energy from the Sun (source, having a surface temperature of
5800 K;the core of the sun is millions of degrees h&) and returns it to
outer space (sinkat 3 K). In this vast temperature range lies the secret of
life and the possibility of work against entropic equilibrium, moving
City out of chaos

living systems away from equilibrium, towards ordered, negentropic,


living states.
Living systems are maintained in a 'steady state,' as far as possible
from equilibrium, by the flow of energy. The solar energy reaching the
lkth is about 343 W/m2; if we consider energy reflected by albedo,
the energy flow received by the biosphere is 240 W/m2. The decrease
in entropy (negentropy) in the biosphere depends on its capacity to
capture energy from the sun and to retransmit it to space as infrared
radiation (positive entropy). If retransmission is prevented, for example
if the planet were shrouded in an adiabatic membrane (greenhouse
effect), a l l living processes would cease very quickly and the system
would decay towards the equilibrium state, that is, towards thermal
death. A sink is just as necessary for Iife as a source.
Morowitz continues that all biological processes depend on
absorption of solar photons and transfer of heat to celestial sinks. The
sun would not be a source of negentropy if there were not a sink for the
flow of thermal energy. The surface of the Earth is at a constant total
energy, re-emitting as much energy as it absorbs. The subtle difference
is that it is not energy per se that makes We continue but the flow of
energy through the system. The global ecological system or biosphere
can be defined as the part of the Earth's surface that is ordered by the
flow of energy through the process of photosynthesis.
All biological processes take place because they are fueled by solar
energy. Harold Morowitz6 notes that it is the tension between
photosynthetic construction and thermal degradation that sustains the
global operation of the biosphere and the great ecological cycles.
It is easy to see that the property of the intermediate system in
Morowitz's diagram is coherent with the properties of dissipative
structures. We saw how ecosystems, living organisms, and cities
belong to this category of systems. In evolutionary thermodynamics,
for example the work of Morowitz and Rigogine, there is a striking

6 Moravitz, H.J.,Farndntions of Bioenergetics. Academic Press: New York, 1978.


change in perspective in the approach to dissipative structures. Tne
focus shifts from the physical elements cmdtuting a system to
the relations and flows that cross it and determine its degree of
dependence on the outside.
In this book, we open a window on regiondl sciences. The need to
radically reinterpret cities and social and economic systems as
organisns that entertain a plurality of relations with the environment
is increasingly evident. Their autonomy is built on these relations of
dependence.

Withdrawal of retmurcee

At the University of Florida, Howard Odatm developed tools for


analyzing systems of all dimensions and types. During his career, he
developed a language to represent system, with the declared aim of
making abstract mathematical models concrete and enabling comparison
of systems of differenttypes, in order to reveal common characteristics.
Odum considered the flows entering and leaving systems and p~ocesses,
such as regional systems or cities and industrial or agricultural
production, i d w g schemes to classify resources and describe their
use h time. H e classified resources as renewable or non-mmvable and
as local or from outside the system in consideration. This was done using
graphie notation?
At an international workhop held in Siena in November 1990,
Odum presented a sequence of simple diagrams of flows and stocks of
energy and matter, providing a schematic general description of the
methods of withdrawing renewable and non-renewable natural
resources? The diagram in Fig. 11 describes a system that exploits a

7 Odum, H.T., Systems Ecology. Wiley: New Yo& 1983; Odua, I-LT.,Ecolo~urland
General Systems. Introduction to Systems Ecology. Colorado University Fress: Niwot, CO,
1994.
8 Odun, H.T., Emergy and biogeochemid cycles. Ecological Physical Chemistry, ed. C .
Rossi and E. Tiezzi, Elsevier:Amsterdam, 1991.
City out of chaos

renewable resource. The circle indicates the source of resource S and


the arrow from the source indicates the flow J towards system, with a
part JRthat is not retained by the system. Arrow p indicates the part of
the input flow captured and arrow pl indicates the part of the energy
converted to form stock QR.All the quantities in the system depend on
interaction with stock QR.How this interaction occurs affects the yield
or efficiency. Arrow qk indicates the quantity of resources withdrawn
from the stock and the entropic output.
Flaws and stocks 65
where the ratio of coefficients indicates the efficiency of the system in
converting retained input @) into system structure @I). Hence:

where p~is the resource captured by the stock minus in f .rand


qk is the part of the stock withdrawn or dissipated.
In the case of an ecosystem, this scheme can represent various types
of processes. In the process of photosynthesis, for example, a minimal
part of a renewable flow of solar energy (the sun is the source) is
captured by the trees of a forest (a stock) and used to fix carbon
and grow, replacing or increasing the biomass. This process in turn
conserves or improves the capacity to capture solar energy and activate
photosynthesis. The capacity to retain and exploit solar energy depends
on the dimension of the stock.
The diagram in Fig. 12 shows use of a non-renewable resource. In
this ease the arrow v is the withdrawal, arrow VI depends on
the efficiency of the system that retains the resource and builds the
stock QN.

Figure 12: Diagram of a system exploiting a non-renewableresource.


66 City out of chaos

The flow of non-renewable resources v withdrawn from stock N is:

dN
V= N x k 4 x Q , hence -=-k4 xNxQ,
dt
wme me flow of resources captured by the system is:

V, = N x k , k7
x Q , where -<1
k4
Therefore,

where n is the resource captured by the stock minus investment and


& is the quantity withdrawn from the stock or dissipated.
Fossil fuels and mined or quarried minerals are typical examples
of non-renewable resources that can be represented as withdrawals
from stocks. In a general interpretation of this scheme, we can say
that extraction of oil is theoretically proportional to the capacity
of a community to exploit energy, grow its economy, and develop
technologies. A society with energy available from oil can invest
energy, grow, extract further oil and produce more energy. The
process of exponential growth of cities and technology in the last
50 years bear witness to this.
Clearly the prospects of exploiting these resources in time are
completely different. Renewable resources like solar energy, kinetic
energy of wind and water and geothermal heat cannot be depleted.
The energy the sun sends to the biosphere in a year is 5.6 x 1024 Joules,
which is much greater than the energy demand of all the natural and
human systems on the planet. The limit of exploitation of a renewable
resource does not depend on its availability but on the capacity to
capture it, which in the case of an ecosystem is the capacity to activate
photosynethesis, whereas in the case of human systems, considering
mcnaS and stocks 67

for example elwWty generation, it depends on the technology and


the yield of system for producing photovokaic, wind, hydroelectric,
geothermal, or biomass energy. The use of renewable resources can
grow to a maximum determined by the limits of space and time, as
pointed out by Herman Daly with regard to the speed of regeneration
and absorption of the biosphere (Chapter 02).
The limit of exploitation of non-renewable resources is imposed by
their availability; withdrawal from a stock is possible until the stock is
exhausted. In the narrow view of traditional economics, this limit
is defined differmtly: withdrawal is possible for as long as it is
economically feasible and is no longer pcwsile when extraction casts
more energy and money than the economic value of the resauree. In
other cases, the effeds caused directly or indirectly by extraction and use
of a resource can further affect that limit for example the need to reduce
consumption of fossil fuels due to atmospheric emissions of CC4 and
greenhovae effect, before natural reserves are exhausted. In any case,
MefiniQuse of nmmewable resources is not a prospect; withdrawal
from a stock will sooner or later decline as the stock is depleted.

Figure 13: Potential exploitation of renewable (left) and non-renewable


(right) resources in time.

The diagrams in Fig. 13 show theoretical potential exploitation


of renewable resources (QR), assumed constant in time U), and
68 City out of chaos

non-renewable resources (QN) that will become depleted (N)? Let the
present time be indicated by the time interval At in which the ability to
capture renewable resources is still extremiely low and non-renewable
rmmees, especially fossil fuels,are still largely used. The diagrams show
the nust probable trend which is difficult to deny. Use of non-renewable
resources continues to increase and sooner or later reaches a maximum
followed by rapid decline. Use of renewable resources increases within
the limits conceded by kchnology and environmentalconditions.
In another diagram (Fig. l4),Odum represented the combined use of
renewable and non-renewable resources. This is an interpretation of an
integrated energy production system based on different sources.Broadly,
let us postulate that stock QR + N indicates a building, a city, or an urban
system that uses different technologies, active and passive, to obtajr~
energy to grow and power itself. For example, in the case of a building,
energy for heating and ventilation comes from renewable m c e s such -
as direct sunli&t throu& windows or roofs and various systems of
-
passive ventilation and from non-renewable sources such as oil,
methane, and electricity (thermoeledric generation).
The efficiency of the system of resource withdrawal and retention
depends on how much of QR is invested in the process. Thus:

dQR+"- p, + vl - 4
-- where ( = k,,x QRia
dt
This scheme has planning value, not only because it is theoretically
possible to choose how much energy and of what type (renewable or
not) to use in an integrated system, but above all because in future this
choice can start a 'virtuous circle' of progressive replacement of non-
renewable by renewable resources.

9The trend of the quantity of resources f and N available has been superimposed on
curves and QN that indicate withdrawal of resources in relation to efficiency in
capturing or exploiting them, although the two vertical axes have different scales (for
example the flow of renewable energy is m y orders of magnitude greater than the
energy that can be captured).In other words, the diagram shows a qualitative trend that
does not match the units of the ordinate.
Figure 14: Diagram of a system exploiting renewable and non-renewable
resources.

With regard to the realistic potential exploitation of resources


described above, the only possibility for sustainability is to use non-
renewable resources to produce systems that can exploit renewable
resources with greater efficiency and continuity, especially in a
permanent manner. This is exactly in line with what Herman Daly
had in mind when he formulated the rule of q w s i sustainability.

Figure 15: Potential combined exploitation of renewable and non-renewable


resources in time. Current trend (left):quasi sustainability (right).
City out of chaos

In an optimistic projection into the future with implementation of


a gradual transition towards an intelligent energy policy, the curve of
energy demand or use should probably fall to a condition of stability
in which it will be possible, by appropriate meansI to use renewable
resources in an optimal and continuous way. The diagram in Fig. 15
shows a possibility of resource exploitation into the future.According to
current trends (left side), it is likely that non-renewable resources (a)
will become depleted and it will be possible to use only renewable
resources (QR).HoweverI the curve QR + N can osciUate within an interval
between a condition of minimum eifiaency and potential maximum
efficiency (right side). In the long term,the latter indicates a final level
of resource withdrawal greater than QR.To obtain this result, part of the
non-renewable resources available today (flow y) must be invested to
power systems for capturing renewable resources (flow p) and create
permanent stocksIincreasing the renewable part of stock QR+ N.

Scheme of a city

Mark T. Brownlo of Florida University was a student of Howard


Odum and is an architect. His account of the first lesson with Odum is
enthusiastic.
As only Odum could do, he had something in his lecturefir everyom. A
little chemistry. ecology, philosophy, meteorology, classical energetics,
biology, even religion ... punctuated by 'mrheads' of diagrams
illustrating the concepts. I listened as he desm'bed systems of varying
scales and complexity and watched as he illustrated his verbal
descriptions with his 'picture mathematics'. 1...] So toward the end of
his lecture he said, kt's drao a diagram of some system, what shall it
be? I stated immediately ... 'a city' ... fir I had been reading and
studying everything 1could find on cities andj2lt 1 could provide afair
amount of infirmation regarding the parts. AM about 20 min a picture
of a city began to emerge that had all my pieces, but they were now

10 Brown,M.T., A pidure is worth a thousand words: Energy systems language and


simulation Ecological Modelling, 178 (14,pp. 83-100,2004.
IogicaUy intermnected through lines representing the flows of
matwialsI energy, and infirmation. I began k, see the structure of the
city system rather than the jumble of pieces that Itad made up the mental
contpositionI culled city. TI2ere on the classroom bhck board a picture of
an urban system merged with its causality, proasse6, and parts
m l e d . Economics, m r g y and ecology were integrated into a single
whole. For t h e j h t time after ymrs of study, I began to see the whole ...
as a whole.
Thd lecture was a transjbrmation. Through the emergence of that
city &gram, I began to question whether one could grasp the
complexities of 'how things w o h d ' by studying pieces ... whether
one could build trnderstmrding of complex systems by putting pieces
together in the hops of comtmcting .whales. As Odum said many
times ... 'one weds a macroscope to see the whole'. In mamy respects
Odum's systems language is mrurroscape jbr itforces mre to 'mmisw'
and diagram the system, the relationships between wmponents, and to
think process. It is top-down in its approach, fbr the jrst thing that
one must do when diagramming a system is list its energy, material
and infirmation sources ... the 'driving energies' as Odum labeled
them. Next the components are listed and then the state variables, and
finally the outputs. In those early dmjs when we were still learning the
langugeI aper completing the kts of sources and companmts, a large
sheet of paper or a blackboard would be employed and eveyone would
gattaev around to suggest how to orgrmize the driving energies and
components into a whole, linked by the Jlows of material, energy,
and information.
The language is picture mathematics. Each symbol is rigorously
and t n a t h a t i d y defined. By d m ' n g a dingrm me,in essence, is
writing equations that describe the system under study. In fact, Odum
suggested that thefirst step in simulation modelling should be to d r m
a &gram of the system. The eqsrakians describing rel-@ and
processes of the system then emerge, simply,from the d i a p m
The language of Odum" was designed to be applied. The inventory of
a l l driving energies sustaining and determining the development of the
city is derived from observation of alI dynamics and main processes
occurring in it. Diagrams provide a concise description of flows of

"Odwa, H.T., EnvImnnent, power and sodety. Wiley New Ywk, 19n;Odum,
H.T.,Enn'mmental Accounting: Emergy and Envirunmantal Deciswn Making. Wiley: New
York, 19%
City out of chaos

resources and transformations that occur in a region; relations


between the system and the outside and between its parts are shown
as flows of energy and matter. An energy diagram offers an overall
view of the dynamics of a city or region, embracing different aspects
and sectors at a glance. Fig. 16 is a diagram of a city based on energy
systems developed by researchers at Siena University.

Figure16 : Diagram of a city according to the criteria of energy systems


language.

In the energy diagram, the large rectangle defines the borders of a vast
r e g i d sy- an 'urban region.' The many relations between internal
and external parts of the system are classified with respect to these
borders. Macrosectors (rounded rectangles and smaller rectangles) are
shown as subsystems with their own speafic processes: agriculture
and forest systems are described as primary transformation processes;
Rows and stocks

electricity generation from renewable and fossil sources and


manufacturing industry are secondary transformation processes. The
diagram is read from left to right, going from resources derived directly
from nature (all to the left of the central dotted vertical line) to man-made
processes of withdrawal, transformation, and co~lsumptionof primary
resources (right of dotted line). The inputs derived directly from the
environment are solar radiation, rain, rivers, geothermal heat, and the
sedimentary cycle (resources on the left, outside the large rectangle).
These flows support all primary and secondary transformation processes
and feed local reserves (tank shaped) such as aquifers, soil (and its
organic material) and mined and quarried materials (these are products
of sedimentary cycles in geological time while withdrawal is relatively
t instantaneous^ they are therefore represented as depletable stocks).
Wastes are treated (industrialprocess) and return.to the city as recycled
materials and energy; they are therefore conceived as a stock, and the
residues of treatment go to a landfill. The other inputs from outside
the system are food and other services acquired on the market, fuels, and
materials (the resources shown at the top). The city is a rectangle inside
which a stock of structures and buildings interacts with a community
of consumers (the hexagon indicates the population). All the arrows
indicate flows of energy and material.The arrows going out on the right
are outputs, such as energy produced and exported, products placed on
the national and global markets directly by industries, goods, services,
and information produced by the city, and wastes treated elsewhere.
A downward-directed arrow leaves the bottom of all the subsystems
in which transformation occurs, and goes to a heat sink, indicating
' dissipation, entropic degradation. If we had also considered regional
control and management by a central administration, we would have
added a series of information flows leaving the city and returning to all
4 '- primary and secondary transformation systems and to the systems of
interaction with renewable and non-renewable natural resources,
affecting the dynamics.
Good government

The effects of good government

In the town hall of Siena, there is a fresco by Ambrogio Lorenzetti


entitled 'the effects of good government.' In the fourteenth century,
the people of Siena were concerned about the criteria for local
government. Lorenzetti shows great activity within the city walls:
finance, craftsmanship, cmtnrction, commerce, politics, culture, and
games. The city flourishes in a beautiful natural settingIrich in forests,
agriculture, and quality products, on which the welfare of citizens
depended and over which citizens exercised control.
On the opposite wall Lorenzetti illustrated the effects of bad
government where everytlung is out of control and order has
degenerated into chaos.

Figure 17: A. Lorenzetti 1338-40.2%~effects of good government, Siena.


City out of chaos

Odum also expressed the meaning of good government through his


diagrams. His energy system diagrams are of course less expressive
but are also 'frescoes of cities.' They include landscape, occupations,
the economy, society, and the city after a long chain of processes. All
the arrows indicate exchange: it may be meat, a basket of fruit, wood,
stone, solar energy, or fuel oil: everything a city needs to live.

Measuring flows: Odum's eMergy

'Thales leaned against the balustrade of the ship and watched his
home Ionia and Miletus fade into the distance. The ship was sailing
for Egypt.' Thus began the Egyptian experience of the mathematician
Thales in the story by Denis Guedj? faithful to Plutarch's Septem

Driven by the Etesii that blao during the dog ahjs of summer, the ship
mssed the Mediterranean directly. The coast of Egypt came into view
and the ship sailed into Lake M o t i s , where Thales embarked up the
Nile in a felucca. Ajkr several days of sailing and many stops in the
vatious cities along the river, hefinally beheld the pyramid of Cheops on
its vast plateau. [...] Thales disembarked. The closer he got to the
pyramid, the slower his pace, as the sheer mass of the monument
slowed his advance. Finally he stopped and sat daun,vanquished. A
#l&h of inlterminate age came up to him. [...] This pyramid was built
by the pharaoh C h e s tofirce humans to admit their wretchedness. The
constnrction had to exceed all norms in order to ovenohelm us better:
the more gigantic it was, the smaller we mould appear. [...]The pharaoh
and his architects wanted tof01ce us to admit that there is no common
denominator between us and the pyramid. 1...] Though built by human
h 4 the m u m e n t had eluded human knowledge fir two tkousrmd
years. W W h a the pharaoh had in mind, it was inapossibb to measure
the height of the pyyawziff. It was the most visible building in the
inhabited world and the only epre that m l d not be measured. lk&s
took up the challenge. [...]He mtemp2ated the pyramid@ a long time
and decided that he mded an ally equal to the adversruy. S h l y his
gaze shifledjkm his own body to his s h a h and back, befire shiftng to

1 Guedj, D., Le TModme du Pewoquet. Seuil: Paris, 1998.


the ppmttZld. Finally TMes raised his eyes: the sun was shining
implacably. Well, he had &nd his ally! Helios to the Greeks and Ra to
the Egyptians, the sun shines on all things without distin&'m. Later,
with regard to relations between humans, thh would be called
'w. By treating the tiny human and the gigantic pyramid in
the same way,the sun established the posm'bility ofa m m o n measure.
W s pondered the fict that the relationship between him and his
s h a h was the same EES thnt of the pyramid with its shdozo. This
meant that when his shndow was as long as his height, the shn$olroof
the pyramid would be the same as its height! He W @ n d the idea he
was seeking.
Thus Thales was able to measure the pyramid of Cheops. Today there
are other types of height that cannot be measured. Like the pyramid
of Cheops in Thales's day, the quantities of processes of production,
economic systems, and cities elude our understanding. Although they
were built by human knd, they have dimensions that seem to exceed all
norms and m h e l r n human beings.These and the processes that feed
them, the inputs and outputs, the natural resources they consume, the
entropy dissipated, cannot be readily measured. Although we have
many types of measures, they do not fully answer our questions.
A major aspect of recent research has been the dwelopment and
testing of environmental accounting methods and sustainability
indicators. In the words of Federico M. Pulselli and coauthors:2
Sustainability cmzlsot be measured beawe it is not a physicsl
p h e n m n . Smtainability is an ideal, so ifwe mnsider a situation we
find that it is sustainable or not sustainable. The answer is almost
always that the system we are anslysing is not sustainable, due to its
use of energy and materials and/or due to the wastes it produces.
Howam, if we inwt the problem and try to understand more about
unsustainability, attempts can be ma& to measure it as the distance
jvm the i M of sustainability, UllsustainabzTityis a relative concept.
Our aim is not to know whether we are sustainable (we kmw we are
not) but how unsustm'mble we are. This can enable us to understand
where we stand in relation to sustainability m'tera and tojnd out what

2IMdi, EM., htianoni, S., Mar&tthi, N. & Tie& E., % Road to Suskrinllbsh'ty:
GDP and Future Generations.WIT Press: Southampton, XU%.
City out of clzaos
we can do to raduce unsustainability. Since the conctlpt of sustaimbility
is complex and not diredly mewrable, many indicators are needed to
r r s s howfir we b e to go to reach thfs goal.

There are many possible indicators, for example the Ecological


Footprint (W. Rees and M. Wackemagel), the Greenhouse Gas
Inventory (IPCC), Exergy (S. Jmgensen),and the Index of Sustainable
Economic Welfare (H. Daly). Here we consider the concept of emergy,
developed by Howard Odum to quantify the flows described in his
diagrams.
Emergy evaluation is a method of e n v i r o n m d accounting that
measures stored energy or rather the energy used (and memorized) in
all phases of the process of production of a good. It has much in
cornaon with an accounting method known as embodied energy, except
that it is not limited to quantif$hg the energy used in all phases of
production by human hand but goes beyond and considers the action
of nature that generated the primary resources, endeavoring to quantify
the work of the environment in energy terms.This is why eMergy is
also known as a sort of m g y mewwy, a definition formulated by David
M. scknceman3, or the memory of all the energy needed to support a
process or system It is the overall energy upstream of a process,
including the man-made part (fuel, elertricity, mamater, machinery,
labor ...) and the natural part (solar energy, sedimentary cycle,
geothermal heat ...) that feeds the primatp. processes on which all
produdion cycles are based. In other words, e m g y analysis aims to
define the emir-tal cost of goods of different categories and to
estinake the quantity of work done by nature to provide the resources
used in production. Odurn sm@t a logical and coherent answer to the
dilemma of how to measure the natural processes that produced the
wood of a tree, the stane obtained from a quarry and oil extracted from
the depths cd the Earth.
We do not know whether Odum was inspired by lhdes but his
search for a common denominator for different physical quantities led
him to the same conclusion as the mathematician of Miletus. Just as the
sun projects the shadows of all things without distinction, so the sun is
the primary energy basis common to all the processes that produced
t h e things. In Odum's theory, solar energy is thecommon denominator
through which the 'real value' of wery natural resource can be estimated,
since everything has an energy content and requires flows of energy and
matter to come into being. The sun shines on the great pyramid of
Cheops and on the human body; it is the prime mover that provided the
energy necessary to form trees, rock, and oil.
According to O d u w 'Quantitative understanding of the
relationships between human-dominated systems and the biosphere is
the realm of emergy analysis.' He conceived emergy as an instrument
to assign an 'environmental value' to resources in proportion to the
'dimension' of the processes producing man-made and natural system.
Different inputs and outputs of systems and processes (fuels, energy,
materials, food ...) may be expressed in terms of solar energy. By
definition,5 emergy is the quantity of solar energy equivalent needed
directly or indirectly to obtain a product by a process or to renew a
resource that has been co~lsurned.The units of emergy are solar ernergy
joules or solar emjoules (sej).

The energy hierarchy

The capacity of a community, for example me population of a city, to do


work depends on the quantity and quality of energy. Odum built his
theo'y on the principle that energy occurs in different forms according

4 Odum, H.T., Self organization, transformity and information. Science, 242,


pp. 1132-1139,1988.
5 Odum, H.T., Environment, Power and Society. Wiley: New York, 197l; Odum, HT.,
Environmental Accounting: Emergy and Environmental Decision W n g . Wiley: New York,
1996.
City out of chaos

to a hierarchy and therefore has different quality. Odum w r o e 'The


scale of energy goes from dilute sunlight up to plant matter! to coal,
from coal to oil, to electricity and up to the highquality work of
computer and human infomation processing.' We know from the
second principle of thermodynamics that transformations are processes
that convert one or more forms of free energy into a different type of
energy. By 'hierarchy,' Odum meant that in nature many units of
energy of lower quality are needed to obtain energy of higher quality.7
This is intuitive if we consider, for example, how we burn many joules
of thermal energy to obtain a joule of electricity. A joule of electricity is
evidently more useful than a joule of oil from our point of view.
The emergy contained in a joule of electricity can be calculated by
tracing the production line back to its origins. In the case of
thermoelectric generation, we can estimate how many kilograms of oil
were burned, how much energy (more oil) was used to extract and
transport that oil, how much energy in geological time it took nature
to compress and fossilize the primordial plant mass, how much
primordial plant mass was buried and subjected to a geological
sedimentary cycle, and how much solar energy was captured by the
primordial phytoplankton to fix carbon through photosynthesis to
create that quantity of plant mass. Obviously the calculation must also
consider geological formation times.8
Resources used in processes have an energy content and an
'environmental cost' per unit energy or mass. The emergy per unit
product reflects the quality of a good. Odum assumed that quality
was proportional to the quantity of solar energy needed over time to
generate a unit of a resource. Sohr transfbmify (sej/J)was the name he
gave to emergy per unit energy and specific emergy (sej/kg) to emergy

Wdum, H.T., Energy ecology and economics. Royal Swedish Academy of Science.
Awbio, 2(6), pp. 220-227,1973.
Brown, M.T., Odum, H.T. & Jsrgensen,S.E., Energy hierarchy and transformity in the
univene. Ecological Modelling, 178, pp. 17-28,2004.
8 Tiezzi, E., Bastianoni, S. Br Marchetblni, N., Environmental cmt and steady state: The
problem of the adiabaticity in the emergy value. Ecological Modelling, 90, pp. 3337,1996.
Good government 81

per unit mass. In either case, emergy per unit (generic) is an intensive
quantity, a characteristic of a good that 'represents the position that a
forcing factor occupies in the hierarchical network of the earth's
biospheref in Odum's words?
It is also evident that emergy per unit is the result of a calculation
that not only depends on the initial and final states of a process (as in
the case of a state function such as energy) but is affected above all by
the various phases of the process. For example, different methods
I of generating electricity have different transformities depending on
the technology used (photovoltaic, wind, hydroelectric, thermoelectric
from biomass, natural gas, and other fuels).
Through an emergy per unit (EU) value, all types of input, whether
in mass (g) or energy units (kwh)can be measured operatively in
emergy terms, that is, on a common basis. By definition, the emergy
Emk of an output flow k of a process is:
n
Em, = z ~ nx EUi
,

where Eni is the effective energy content of the ith input and EU, is the
emergy per unit of the ith input. The emergy per unit of inputs is in
turn derived from a previous process. The last process in the chain,
flow s, is direct irradiation of solar energy En, where the emergy per
unitisl.
Em, = En, 3 EU, = 1 PI
Emergy measures all the solar energy that generates a flow. Once the
set of values of emergy per unit of the different flows or products
originating directly from solar energy is known, it is possible to assess
the indirect solar energy of other processes for which the inputs are
known. Emergy per unit of a final product k, obtained by Equation 1,
can also be calculated once all the steps have been computed.
City out of chaos

EU, = ~m,/En,
= (2En,x EU,)/En,
where Enk is the effective energy content of product or flow k.
The combination of extensive quantities (energy or mass) with
emergy per unit, an intensive quantity, is an operation that brings
quantitative and qualitative aspecb together. Besides the quantity of
resource involved in a process, also the quality of the process matters.
This aspect of emergy assessment is in line with a basic premise, a
spec&catim necessary to tackle the problem of measuring sustainability,
namely that INstainability is an 'extensive problem.' On this topic, F.M.
Pulselli and coauthors1a write
In 1865, the economist William Stan@ J m n s observed a sharp increase
in coal consumption aftev Watt's impmuemmts to Newcornen's steam
engine. This phenomenon is knoum as Jerxms's pradox. Many thuught
that more efficient engines zaarld curb coal consumption, but total
consumption increased despite the reduction in coal requirements pu
unit. By making the steam engine more efficient, Watt helped to spread its
use throughout the country. Since the industrial process was more
economical,firms carM increase production without extm cost. Economy
of use led to extensive consumption. In everyday lij2 we often encounter
this paradox: machines are increasingly powerfirl, computers increase
in speed to suppo~our work, but alas, the qumztity of work continues
to grow! [...I In thermodynamics, there are intensl've and extensizte
quantities. Intensive quantities such as tempmature, M t y and pressure
are not a@&d by the size of the system [. ..I. E x h i v e quantities such
as mass, volume and energy depend on the size of the system [...I.
Thermodynamically, sustm'nability is an extensive concept becam it
depends on the total, limited milability of resources and on a finite
system's capacity to a c q t w t e s and contaminants. Imp-t of
intensiene pmametm (eficiency, CO2 per unit pmduct or p em)is not
sufficient to r e h a unsustainability. The improvement in efficiency has to
be accompanied by a parallel decrease in total consumption, with a
consequent decrease in wastes.

10 Cit. Pulselli et al., 2008.


Good government 83

In this sense, Odum's emergy seems impeccable. In emergy assessment,


certain resources have a higher specific weight than others, but it is clear
that an overall balance is made with all the forces, whatwer their
intensity, that sustain the system and that the system in turn has on the
environment The bigger the overall emergy flow needed to support a
process generating a type of energy or a material, the pea&the quantity
of solar energy it 'coflsumes,' or the greater the past and present
environmentalcost to obtain it or regenerate it
1 The urban region

Cities consume many resources and draw from different external sources
since there are very few natural resources within urban systems due
to lack of space, especially in cities with high population densities and
hmogeneous urban fabric. Thus if we consider the analogy between
urban systems and biological organisms introduced in Chapter 02, cities
can be thought of as having a metabolism. To understand how they
function it is fundamental to consider the role of natural ecosystems
outside the city limits. Cities cannot be autonomous in any way, if
autonomy means independence and isolation from their surroundings,
except in the sense proposed by Edgar Morin (Chapter 02) of autonomy
based on dependence.
In a definition of Raymond Delavigne?* the city organism has many
of the features of ecosystemsl but on its own and out of its broader
1
context, can only be an incomplete ecosystem. In his words:
i In reality, the town, the agglomeration, or the conurbation is nothing
J

i more than a 'truncated emsystem', incapable of existing on its avn


5 within the conjines of its tem'tory but rather a ~ ' b u f a of
y a much
vaster territory fir its suroival and daily functioning which it
")
d dominates, exploits, and as some would say acts upon as a parasite. This
zone ofimposed solidarity, this vital basin is what is common2y refprred

" Delavigne, R.H., Endronnement et aYveloppement durable en Ile-&-France. IAURIF: ParisE


i 1998.
City out of chaos
to as an urban region. It is made up of constructed zones ofall kinds but
also ofjXds,fiests, and bodies of water.
The representation of a city we saw in Odum's diagram can be
extended to an urban region This heterogeneous context draws
rem- in vslrious fopms, receive6 energy from the sun, rain, and
wind, exploits geo-bmdheat and organic matter in the soil, extracts
miner& frQmquarries and mines" accumula,tes goods from outside,
uses fossil fuels to power transport, agricultural machinery, Mus&y
and services, generates electricity from sunlight, kinetic energy of wind,
and water, biomassI wastesl and other fuels. Similarly, the various
regional systems trade outputs of products and release degraded
energy with their wastes. These con.tinuous exchanges with the outside
sustain and enable city metabolism
We dm saw that emergy analysis can quantdy these flows and
express them in a common unit, solar energy equivalent, so that a
balance including everything can be drawn up. The next step is to by
to transfer the understanding acquired by theoretical diagrams and
numeTical calmlatiom to planning real regional s y s m . According to
Mwcarucci:12
In prqmsi~gany idea of rvgional planning we have to build an
interpretative representation of the locnl context and the relationships
it entertains with the global context. W e have tn imagine what can
represent this local context today, within global networks that
organize regions: not just adapt physical space to the new needs of
society and context but rethink the re@onal role of that physical spa@
and imagine coherent new spatial configmatiom.
7'his obfervaticm wq& sp%l sig&came if we consider that cities
entertain reh- of dependence with vast regions and that these
relationships have a gtobal dimension in contemporary economic systems.
The network of relations and processes existing in a region has a spatial
configuration that may not seem hoxxqemxm: different local contexts
have inputs and outputs of energy, materials, information, and persons
of differeslt intensities. It is possible to imagine coherent new spatial
cmFpm~ms if we investigatethe configurations of &g relationships
(these cannot be observed directly) and if we discover which of them can
be con&ued into the future.
Emergy analysis makes it possible to identify and quantify relations
martained by a local context with other s ystem on a global scale and
with local resources. How do flows of energy and materials reach the
region? How are flows of local resources drawn from stocks? How are
they distributed in space and with what intensity? The answer to these
questions can provide a key for regional planning, &g with the
interpretative representation of the local context in relation to the global
dimension described by Mascaruca.

Cities and the geography of flows: the case of Siena

The h ~ c by o h b m g i o Lorenzetli may have had mething to do


with the fact that Sima developed prosperously and is still reaping
the fruits. In Siena, me has the impression of things handed down
from the pitst certain traditions, attitudes, and instincts have an
ancient flavor.
As in Loreflzettigsday, the admidstrations of Siena ponder the best
criteria for good government. There have been recent assessments of
development trends of the city and province based on sustainabitity
indicators and environmemtal compatibility. In a study involving many
researchers of Siena University in collaboration with other European
m d North American universities (SPInEco project13 financed by
the Prwincl'al Administration and the Monte dei Paschi di Siena
Foundation), many aspects of regional health and resources were
evaluabed. Here we will look some of these.

"The results d the SPln Em project were published in a special issue d the Journal of
Enoimmental Aht~agement(86,2008).
City out of chaos

When the ecological footprint14and biocapacity were calculated for


the whole province, which has an area of 382,122 ha and a population
of 253,000, the balance was almost perfect. A footprint of 1,497,000 gha
was estimated against a biocapacity of 1,452,000 gha, making an
ecological deficit of only about 3%.According to the idea that inspired
this sustainability indicator (see Chapter 02), the province is a self-
sufficient system. The city has evidently established and maintained a
close link with the rest of the province, exercising its influence evenly,
presumably through the instruments of politics, culture, finance, and
t o m planning.
Of course, what we mean by self-sufficiency is only theoretical. We
know that this is not true, or certainly not in the terms depicted by
Lorenzetti who suggested that the city provided for itself directly.
Though Siena is only a small provincial city, it is a node in a global
network that involves all contemporary cities. For example, one of
the many signs of this can be observed by taking a walk through the
historical center and trying to guess the provenance of the many
groups of tourists, or by considering where wine produced in Chianti,
Montalcino, and Montepulciano is shipped. Much of the local economy
is based on these two activities. In any case we can proudly say that
the trend of development of Siena has been kept within the limits
of sustainability, at least according to the criteria of the ecological
footprint.
In this rare context of quasi sustainability (Chapter 05), what interests
us are the new aspects that emerge when we look at this balance of
footprint and biocapacity in greater detail, for example on a municipal
scale. The provincial system is not homogeneous but has parts with
different functions and vocations. Cersain areas, which include the
urbanized areas of the center of Siena, its outskirts, and a few t o m are
parts of the system that absorb resources. Siena and the ten other

Bagliani, M., Galli, A, Niccolucd, V. & Marchettini, N., Ecological footprint analysis
14
applied to a s u b n a t i d area: the case of the Province of Siem (Italy). Journal of
Endmnmental Management, 86, pp. 354-364,2008.
Good government 87

relatively urbanized municipalities of the province are the parts of the


system in ecological deficit, Together they have a deficit of 630,000 gha
and their overall footprint is almost double (1.7 times) their biocapacity.
The city of Siena, in particular, has a footprint about six times its
biocapacity. These nuclei are balanced by other areas with a high
vocation of naturalness. These parts of the provincial system have an
ecological surplus and constitute natural stocks that compensate the
environmental impact of the energy-guzzling, dissipative city and
towns. The biocapacity of these municipalities is greater than their
footprint by 584,000 gha. By estimating the consumption of the local
population, the footprint method made it possible to see the different
roles of parts of the system through a mechanism of credits, and to
quantdy the importance of relationships with the environment (in
global terms) that directly or indirectly support the activities of local
communities.
In the framework of this research project, an emergy analysis of
the province and its 36 municipalities15 was conducted. The analysis
considered the main flows in the various sectors, estimating the
quantities of energy and matter used in the province in a year: solar
energy received (1.64 x 1019 J), precipitation (3.13 x 109 m3), kinetic
energy of wind (8.09 x 1015 J), geothermal heat (1.34 x lox6J),soil erosion
(4.43 x 104 t of organic matter), water consumed (2.06 x 107 m3), stone
and gravel quarried (3.28 x 106 t), locally generated electricity (9.25 x 108
kwh), imporkd electricity (1.03 x 108 kwh), and other imports: diesel
fuel and petrol (2.08 x 105 t), fuel oil and other petroleum products
(500 t), natural gas (1.44 x 108 m3), agrrrultural products (1.78 x 104 t),
meat (2.73 x 103 t), minerals (5.47 x 10.3 t), food (1.29 x 104 t), wood in
different forms (9.56 x 104 t), paper in different forms (6.76 x 107 t), and
other manufactures (8.26 x 104 t).

15- RM.,Pulse& F.M. & Rustid, M.,Emergy actounting of the Province of


S i e ~ : Towards a thermodynamic geography for regional studies. Jarmal of
E n ~ r m m f aManagement,
l 86, pp. 342-353,2008.
City out of chaos

The emergy of these flows can be compared to obtain an overall


balance. Total e m q y input (1.12 x 1012 sej) was partly (33%)due to
imporbed goods acquired on the market, such as fuel (fi = 1.73 x 1021sej),
food and materials (F2 = 1.98 x 1021 sej), partly (54%) due to resources
withdrawn from local stocks, especially quarried material (N= 6.03 x 1021
sej), and the mnaining minor part (13%)was from renewable natural
resources (R = 1.43 x 1021 sej). Besides classifying these resources as
renewable, non-renewable, extend, and local, a detailed study was done
detemhing the role of different activities in the overall system. Specific
assessment of each municipahty in the province made it possible
to discover the 'pgraphf of the province with respect to use of
environmental resources. Wferent intensities of inputs showed a non-
homogeneous distribution over the province that reflected the different
in- of direct or indirect exploitation of environmental resources
going on in the various local contexts. Fig. 18 is a map of the province of
Siena showing theintensity of emergy flows in the 36 municipalities.
The 'emergy geograpy reflected the use of environmental resources
in the different municipalities, revealing a general organizationalscheme.
Areas with greater and lesser intensity had very difftmmt vocations and
developmentprospects. Areas with high intensity emergy flows formed a
homogeneous zone around the aty of Siena, including towns and other
particularly energy-hungry activities (high consumption of energy or
import of large quantities of materials for processes) such as industrial
districts and extraction of primary materials, such as quarries. These
areas were mamly located along the main roads entering Siena from the
east (from the A1 autostrada) and north (from Florence). Areas with less
intensity had prevalently natural vocations, generally with extensive
forests. They formed a homogeneous area with low population density
and little industry or agriculture. An interesting ridge of low emergy
intensity united the west and south of the province. The Cassia, a Roman
road linking Rome and Florence, lost its historical function as an artery
when road connections developed along the northeast axis.
Good government

Figure 18: Map of inteneity of mergy flows in the province of Siena ana ~ t s
36 municipalities.

The results of this project were transmitted to the administrations of


the province and municipalities as a regional planning guide. The
Provincial Administration obtained an estimate of the load of the
various sectors on the environment, by municipality and an overall
picture of the province. The municipal councils acquired information
about their profiles as consumers of natural resources and their role in
the provincial system. Naturally, the boundaries of the system were
chosen to coincide with administrative boundaries at the start of
the study.
Estimation of inputs of energy and materials and their distributions
revealed a 'landscape' that went beyond the visual landscape that made
City out of chaos

Siena famous throughout the world. Siena, enclosed physically by its


ancient walls, is still a node as it was in the past and exercises control over
a vast area. However, the urban region has fuzzy borders and vast global
dimensions through communication with the outside. A local context is
not necessarily part of a system when it is overtaken by an expanding
city but when it is 'involved in the ulnqui- material networks of
infrastructures and the immaterial networks of convenience and trade in
the global market,' to qude h4acarucci. These networks change the sense
of places profoundly. The map of emergy flows &s a privileged view
of these immaterial networks that could not otherwise be observed. It
defines the sense of places through the relations they establish with
the world around them and through the local or imported flows that
feed them.

Another emergy landscape: the case of Cagliari

A study of the overall organization of the province of Cagliari,16 as far


as use of resources is concerned, was conducted in the framework of a
research project of Siena University. The spatial configuration of the
regional system was visualized on the basis of emergy input intensity
throughout the province of Cagliari. The province occupies a large part
of southern Sardinia with an area of 670,000 ha and a population of
760,000. In this case, the emergy analysis was conducted without
considering administrative boundaries and was mapped on the basis of
the flows supporting the activities of the 109 municipalities. We initially
presented the results of Fig. 19 without further speaficatim. The tones
of gray were in themselves eloquent of where the main activities were
and of the destinations of large quantities of energy and materials. It
was also clear that the emergy flows were very dilute in other parts of
the province. In a single picture, emergy intensity showed how the

'6Pulaelli, RM., Rustici, M. & Marchettini, N., An integrated framework for regional
5
studies: Emergy based spatial analysis of the Province of Cagliari. Environmental
Monituring and Assessment, 133, pp. 1-13,2007.
Good gbvernment

prmincid system opered, distinguishing city from areas with lower


population density, industrial districtsf farmland and prevalently
natural areas.

Figure19 Map of emergy density in the province of Cagliari in southern


Sardinia.

The total emergy input of province was 5.72 x 10" sej. Fig. 20
-! shows the same map but with emergy contour lines, a sort of emergy
4
c!
landscape. It indicates three main areas with high intensity emergy
f input containing nodes with very high values. The Eirst extends around
3
5
the Gulf of C a g h where 37%of the emergy used in the province was
concentrated. The city of Cagliari alone (center and inland extension)
received a flow of 1.23 x 1022 sej, about 22% of the total. The high
A emergy area included industrial areas to the east and west that coincide
Y with a sprawling conurbation. The second area, on the west coast,
, absorbed 28% of the emergy of the province. It includes the industrial
'S
City out of chaos

area a r m d the harbor of Portmmo that consumed 19%of the total,


namely 1.10 x 1022 sej. The third area, along an inland axis behind
Cagliari, consumed 14%of the totalemergy input.
Two point anomalies due to supra-regional activities were excluded
from this analysis. The quantities of energy and matter processed in
these two sites had values totally at variance with provincial trends.
These anomalies were a refinery (4.00 x 1022 sej) and an industrial
district (3.56 x lW sej) new a port that handled h p o r t and export trade
with mainland Italy and other colultsies. The emergy inputs of these
two industrial centers far exceeded the emergy feeding all the other
activities in the province. Apart from these two critical situations which
were considered and reported separately, more than80% of the emergy
input of the pr.cwince d CagW was concentrated in the urbanized area
which was less than a third of the total area. Tke rest of the province,
powered by low-intensity flows, was sparsely settled and provided
natural stocks which in theory slrould host ecosystems that at least
partly compensate the city's demand for environmentalresources.
This was also reflected by the ecolq@Afootprint and biocapacity of
the province. The footprint of the population of the province was
4,147,000 gha against a biocapacity of 3,081,000 &a. The province is
therefore in ecological deficit (1,066,000 gha) by 34% which is relatively
small compared to the situation of many other European cities. The
footprint of the whole urban region indicated that the vast biologically
productive areas were not enough to balance the city's impact and
consumption. Detailed analysis of the homogeneous areas identified
offered further information. The footprint of the area around the Gulf of
Caglian including the city was more than four times its biocapacity,
whereas the footprint of the area around the district of Portoscuso
exceeded its biocapacity by 84%. Both had an ecological deficit of about
1,926,000 gha. There were other minor areas in ecological deficit, such
as the island of Sant'Antioco (footprint double its biocapacity), but on
the whole the rest of the province had an ecological surplus of more
than 860,000gha which was only 35%of its biocapacity.
Figure 20: Distribution of emergy flows in the province of Cagliari.

Clearly the province of Cag.L.lariwas not a c o m p l ~ self-sufficient


y area
since its footprint exceeded its biocapacity; however, the analysis
revealed contexts with different functions and vocations. As explained
for dissipative systems, primary resauces and natural sinks for wastes
are a necessary condition for life. Any regional program must consider
these aspeds and besides developing lowcotlsumption infrastructures
and services in urban areas, must conserve and promote parts of the
r e e n that act as natural stocks and sinks. Enduring sustainable
development can be planned by interpreting regions as integrated
systems of abiotic and biotic components.
Returning to the regional project, Mascarucci17writes:
City out of chaos
The process of programing clmelpment must Uzerefi,ve consider
simultaneously all posdbk sparial eficfs k t ch@rent intoaentions
cause on mny scales, thejwt p b e of '@zsibilityfstudy should
be a regional s k i p in which a physical-sptfal approach is more
impaWnt than an e40~f~t~k aoe.
Mobile geographies

Eye traces

In a specla1 edition of the German daily newspaper FrankbW


AUgemeine, there are no heiudlines, titles, articles, photographs,
announcements, or advertisements, no normal newspaper format, no
columns of print, main titles, minor headqs, or references to
continuations on other pages. No geometry. No structure. All the pages
have been cancelled and covered in scribbles. A tangled,disordered black
line meanders across the sheets.
The Frankfurt artist Jochem Hendricks, who produced this edition
of the Fr- Allgemeine for a contemporary art exhibition entitled
Newspaper, explains:
This newspaper has already been read. The movements of the y e s
while reading were recorded, digitized and printed out. Something of
the otherwise invisible process of reading is made visible, and a trace
of the absorption of information remains.
This trace is all that the author wanted us to see. He takes us beyond
the page structure and shows us how the reader uses the newspaper,
how eyes follow the lines, how the glance travels the two-dimensional
space of the page and exploits the ordered scheme. How the eyes
search and move.
City out of chaos

Hendricks makes us see an object of daily use from a new point of


view, or rather, the subject observed changes: it is not the physical space
with which we interact but how we behave with respect to that space.
What relationship do we have with it? How do we move within its
format? How can we study our behavior towards the real world, things,
olgects, the environment, and nature?

By mans of technical aia3 (kjbmd, video and mpter kahniques)


hummzeyenouemanZsaYetxaaedand&@ti-8c!d&ring~~wF3tjroaess
of looking at something;so that an &jet print act of these movements
can be created 'Ey-drawings~not 4investigate the prows of looking
at emyday objects in the jbnn of photographs or real three-dime)2siopI11l
items, but ppnrmnily circle mound kws of march and UPe vh&ation
oftzbtntd motives rmd ptvwws e.g., time, &g, mzunting,
dtrwuing,
light and afterimage,culminating in the denial ofgaze: m ~ n p-sthe
invisible is made &Zde by mans of a tmce.

Let us imagine a similar operation carried out with a city. We could


v k u l i z e the trajectories of cars, persons, some type of goods on a
map of the city; we could mesure the intensity of infomation on the
basis of words pronounced or bits exchanged on the web. Each would
-

1 Hendricks, J., Eye Drmuings. Vexer Verlag: St Gd,1993.


Mofiik geographies 97
produce a pattern with its own dynamics. We could obtain a lively
colorful work of art, but &e purpose of such an experiment would
more likely be to attribute a different and mare complete meaning to
the perception of a contemporary city, beyond its form and geometry.
We know that many activities, relations, and processes with
different intensities and variable modes occur in cities, but since the
great economic development of the 1960s and 709, modem town
planners have reduced cities to structure. Cities have generally been
represented as something inert, mchmgeable, permament, a cold
summation of buildingsI techno1ogies, and other distinct and isolated
elements. In the meantime, especially recently, greater integration sf
functions and the resulting increase in dynamic and social complexity
has made understanding of the timing and manners d use of urban
space more uncertain and complicated. O h a t i o n of urban system
by traditional means of analysis and represatation no longer captured
the many factors coexisting in contemporary cities. A univocal
interpretation of city space, for example by classical fusldonal zoning,
became ~ ~ u a t New e . forms of inveskigation wme needed: new
instrunentsmdmviiews.
Technolw is modifying the mannm in which public and private
spaces are used, while the econotrmy is eliminating certain activities
and stimulating others; the demand for requisites is changing fast and
the supply to meet it is adjusting just as quickly (demand does not
always precede supply). Our capacity to control changes in society,
culture, and regions seems unable to adjust. As underlined by Michael
Battyr2director of the Centrefor Advanced Spatial Analysis at University
College London, 'The city has become more rather than less complicated
tkanks to these innovations, and our ability to makz sense 4 these changes in
themtical and scientijic ttivmrs has not kept up.'
Theperceptionthatwbmqstemsmdsocietyh21~~norefluid
gives rise to the need for a nav approach to observation and md.tioringof

ZBatty, M, Unwired dties. Environment and P h n i n g B: Plmzning rmd Design, 30(6J,


pp. 797-m,203.
98 Cifyout of chaos

Mnijkstation ofthe powers that configure the city has shifidfiom the
cluItrmrdly visible to the im'sible; that is, the dfy is not rmiewd
2ikmgh c c ~ m p r o m ~gravity,
~, $mif or &l, as mu& as it is
thmugh dempphics and economic perjbmzaw. I.. .] no b g e r is the
d)y visualized or composed as much as it is empirically computed
These are the very plwmmma that introdwe a new key for
inkqmthg city agmbation. By reading form that change in a set of
&tiom that rmefy and Wendy, of cofnm-es that adapt in time,
dtb become unhooked from their &tic configuratim and become Eke
~~ h actin, developing and modiying their i b w t k m and
activating aew processes in a dynamic network.
About thisnew perspective, Bateyq writes:
Dynamics has become sip@carrtlymore important than structures in
pmiding the essential drioers 1...I. The idea that systems can be
eqbined in static kwns nour seems nonsensical [...]. Dynamics of
mrse represents the key to all of this. As archibctsr and planners and
urban theorists, we delight in approaching the city in terms of its
morphology but morphology is rtot enough. It must be unpadced and
the only way to unpack it is t h u g h dpamics.
With Hendricks in mind, attention in urban studies shifts from
the constructed form (like the page format of a newspaper) to its
interactionsMth the living organisms that exploit it (eye traces).

Organizational units

From the point of view of evdution and complexity, interadions with


~popEulatianarewhatslGake~anorganismdenabkthen~ be

3KooUaas' R, Boeri, S., Kwinter, S.,Tazi, N.& Obrist, H.U., Mutations. Actar, Art en
Reve Centre d'Architecture: Bordeaux, 2000.
"w, M., Less i s ilhore, more is differmt Complexity, morphology, cities, and
emergence.Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design,272). pp. 166-168,2000.
Mobile geographies

interpreted as such.Cities combine a n o n - h g component (buildings,


roads, infrashxtwe) with a dynamic living human component (free
will, personalityr emDtions, supply and demand, habits, and cmsbms).
In cities, a set of lifeless smctural elements combines with a social
component, a community of individuals, groups,administrati- bodies,
firms, and other types of organisms. These modify the city profile and
are influenced in by the city.
This co-tion of living and non-living fallswi&in the framework
of orgunic urban y&ms nrentioned in previous c h a p . Wfi this
combim~ of living and non-living, the city can thee-y have all
fhedy.nrttnicehara~ofalivingsystemA~containkg~
P elements absorbs their properties (rational and e m d i d ) and makes
than ink, a whole. The whole is dificdt to dekmine and cannot be
controlled by medwMk laws.
Considering an urban system as an organismwith behavior resembling
thatofan~isa~ppWmforawhole~of~~ban~digs.
According to l3uo Soandma5 'A city is like an artifid ecasystesl where
there is continuous exchmge between living organism and the physical
built environment in which they live.' This statement teems to elaborate a
well-known definition of ecosystem by Eugene 0dm6adapting it to
urban system: 'An ecosystem is a unit of biological organhticm made up
of all of the organisms in a given area himacting with the phydd

An organic concept of city, h t is with q a as in the


above definiti0;njccnzfirms the appqxiatmess of -c the set of
r&tbnsbetween(~3mmunityand~~asanor~~
whole. It cmfkm the principle of systems emlogy of t a h q organizatid
and dwelopmenkd properties of ecosystems as wholes, and stud* their
structural and dynamic properties. As sustained by Robert Ulanowicz?

5 Ehndurra, E.,JZ progetto della cittd ecologica. EhLibrk Milano, 1994.


6 Odum, B., The strategy d ecosystem development.SciaJlae, 164, pp.262-270,1969.
7 ulaM.Mrlcz,RE., Gmwth and Deuetopment: Ecosystems Phenomenology. Sprinw-Vmkg
N e w York,1986.
City out of chaos

slmetural and dynamir pmpwtb of systems composed of m y


inter* ~ m l e v e lconstituents, including urban system, can be
studied to describe and explain the fomatbn of m.wcmlecFelpiattam.
To give a better idea of this search for a whole form, Erich Jantsch8
expressed this interesting reflection. Since we are dealing with
evolution and design,
'Human 2ifi is movement. It is movement not by and fir itself; but
within a dynamic morld, within mowments of higher order. These
higher-ordar movements constitute the liji of human systems.'
According to t . view, the life of hwnan systems is considered as a
whole, as a unique system with emerging collective propefties, not
just as the sum of individual behaviors.
In such systems, relations between the parts can trigger non-linear
behaviors, amplrfy localized actions or tiny perhubations and beyand
an irrstability threshold, may change the behavior of a large part or all
of the system. These processes are the subject of research into self-
organization of urban systems. The first question the researn:hem of
city complexity want to answer is how to observe the birth of such
h i g h (EP& phenomena.

Urban landscape ecology

Landscape ecology is the science of in~actionsbetween populations and


their regions. Monica Turner and coautho~s9descrji it as the study of
the effect of patbern on process on a large scale. It is concerned with the
relations between struchrres and functions in an end&vor to understzlnd,
for example, how physical structures affectthe number and &.tribution
of organisms.
-
-

8 Jantsch,E., Design for Evolution: Self-Organizati and Planning in the Li$ of Human
Systems. Gearge BrazjUer: New Yo& 1975.
9TurnerI M.G., Landscape ecology:The effectof pattern rm process. Ann. Rev. E d . Sysf,
20, pp. 171-197,1989;Turner,M.,Gardner, G.RH. & CYNa RV., Landscape Ecology in
Tkoy and Pram'm: Pattern and Process. Springer: New York, 2001.
'we snall apply this approach, generally used to study ecosystems
and fauna populations, to the study of urban systems and society. In
practical terms, we observe h a t humans in an urban system need
operational (spatial and temporal) dimensions for proper functioning:
for working, eating, entertaining relationships, having fun, loving.
This was expressed by Farina and Elelgran~~~ for organisms in
ecosysteas:
For every function it perfbrms - like searching fir Jbad, mating,
defknding tewitmy, migrating and roosting - an oqanism repifis an
operational space with wolagieul &ra&'stics to achkve the best
perjimnance.
Even in this simplified version of landscape ecology, the study nethods
are in some ways coherent with IWgDginers theories on complex
systems and self-organization. To understand the organization of a
s~xstemin the perspective of J?rigogine, space should not only be
interpreted geometrically but in the Aristotelian sense, modeled by the
functions that occur within it (Chapter 03).
The notion of landscape implies an overall view including space
and time, as expressed by Prigogine. Zev Navehll defines landscape
from a landscape-ecology point of view as 'a concrete, space-time
defined ordered whole human system.' He adds12
Complex network interactions (between living organisms/people and
their mn-living physical context) m n o t be m m p r h d e d merely by
analysis, but only @ synthesis within the context of the organization
of the whole.
he theme of overall organization or organizational unity, already
mentioned, is always a basic node of this transition.

lo Farina,A. gt Bel&~pmo, A, The eco-field hypothesis: Toward a oognitive landacape.


Landscape Ecology, 2l,pp. 5-17,2006.
Naveh, Z., Landscape ecology as an emerghg branch of human emsystem science.
Adonnaes in Ecobgy Research, 12, pp. 1894237,1982.
* Nawh, Z., Ten major premise8 hr a holistic concep- c& mdtifunaionallandscapes.
Landscape and Urban PLznning, 57, pp. 269-284,20IP1.
City out of chaos

With regard to ths instrments needed for landscape research,


Marina Alberti and coauthorsi3 suggested the need for a view that
expldm how landscape-scale organization of structures and processes
in urbanizing regions, how it is maintained, and how it evolves
by local inkractions d proceases that occur at s d r scab among
d, economic, ecological, and physical agents.
In this sense, the approach of landscape ecology applied to cities
investigates the dwposition of physical components, functions and
services of the urban landscape, in relation to the population that
exploits thm.This confirms the need to complete traditional studies of
urban geometry with a dynamic, evolutionary time component To
describe these aspects we have to invent a system of obtammg and
calcula.tingstatistical and quantitative data that expresses temporal and
spatial paraazleters. P r m W g of this type of information is an
instnunent that can reveal variable configuratiom and geographies
generated by different forms oi activity in the urban context Only from
the results of a study with these characterktb we can observe the
evolutionary and adaptive nature of the society-environment, human-
city, and living-non-living systems of relations we are dealtng with

Telecommunications and mobile geographies

Mobile phones and wireless systems have spread rapidly since the
1990s. Since then, information is exchanged in a completely different
way and the manner of interacting, moving, and using public and
private urban space has changed. These systems have reformulated
many procedures and facilitated activities that once required offices
and physical connection to the phone network. Increased freedom of
movement without loss of contact and connection has made it
possible to exploit urban space in a more elastic manner.

13Alberti, M., Marzluff, J.M., Shulenberger, E., Bradley, G., Ryan, C. Br Zumbrunnen, C.,
Integrating humam into ecology: Opporhdty and drallenges for studying urban
ecosystems. BioScience, 53(12), pp. 1169-1179,2003.
Mobile geogfaphies

The dynamics of populations with respect to urban functions are


more complicated than they were yesterday due to the possibilities
offered by technology. Technology can however be a source of
information for dekmining these dynamics. 'Location-based services,'
invented in the USA in the 1990s and subsequently spreading to Europe,
are an example. They were automated to offer users sophisticated
instruments for orientation and interaction with the physical
environment and with other persons in movement based on the location
of mobile phones. In a recent experimental study begun in 2004 at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology SENSEabZe City Laboratmy,
researchers at Siena University used these techniques to analyze mobility
dynamics in urban areas.
The research focused on the processing of GSM (Global System
Mobile) and UMTS (Universal Mobile Telec~muniationsSystem)
antenna activity of mobile phones in a certain region. The idea was to use
this information to develop a way of monitoring urban demographic
density in real time a sort of 'dynamic census' of the population. The
intensity of cell phone activity (number of calls) was taken as a good
estimate of cell phone user density; in Italy, these users were a large
proportion of the population.l4 Recent stathtks on mobile phones in
Europe and Italy, where the first applications were developed, confirm
that this is true and report a high percentage of stable mobile phone users
in the population (in 2006, in more than 30 European countries, the use of
cell phones exceeded 100%.In Italy, Great Britain, and Sweden it is over
110%, (with 80435% of the population stable users). These high levels
make the study interesting.
In the Siena research project, telephone traffic data was obtained in
the range of antennas which record the number of users connected at
a given time. The range of an antenna is known as a cell. Antennas
transmit on sets of radio channels that differ from those of adjacent
cells to avoid interference. The exact position of each antenna or radio

l4 European Information Technology Observatory (EITO), 2807


City out of chaos

b e l the direction in which it is orientated and its pwer are known,


so that the shape of the cell covered by the si& is known. In theory,
c e b are elliptical in form (fhe hkrsectbn of a cone projected on
a horizontal surface by the although they are b c W y
irregular due to physical obstacles.

Figure 22: Plan of a radio base (center) and its cells with their different
orientation, power, and distance of signal propagation.

Once the form of the cells and their distribution on the ground had been
recomtmcted, telephone tr&c data was processed for each antenna
which recorded the number of calls made by users. This information
was routinely recorded by telephone operators at intervals of one hour.
Mobile geographies 105

Changes in daily and seasonal intensity and their evolution in space


and time were observed on the basis of cell position and phone traffic.
The aim of the research was to propose a way of visualizing use of
urban space through temporal paramete=. Compared to traditional
methods of analysis based for example on classicalzoning that establishes
how difkrent urban areas are usedIthe present method attempts to define
when,@ ha0 long, and ha0 intensely city space is used. According to Carlo
Ratti and c~authors?~ this method 'offers an opportunity to understand the
mutating complexity of the contemporarycity. Its focus on temporal, rather
than spatial patterns suggests a possible new paradigm for urban analysis.'
In this perspectiveI the manner in which city users exploit space can be
monitored and measured in time, which is an advance with respect to
conventionaldescriptionsof land use.
Dynamx maps and diagrams can be used to identify and classlfy
different urban areas on the basis of continuous or periodic use and
intensity. Cases of maximum or minimum presence can be detected and
variations in intensity measured in the course of the day or in different
seasons. For example, maxima and minima can be observed in certain
residential areas of the periphery or in offices or an industrial district
over a period of 24 hours. Variations in intensity in a crowded center
can be compared for Saturday afternoons in spring and Sundays in
mid-August. It is possible to monitor a seaside resort and assess the
difference in movements between a summer weekend and a dismal
November weekday. By studying city dynamics and when activities
occur, by observing people's movements and the development of
critical situations at spatial nodes or time intervalsI the potential of this
method can be exploited for regional planning and programming.
The results of the research, shown in sequences of maps, created a
sort of 'mobile geography' that revealed system organization and how
it adapted. Sequences of variations in intensity showed how localized

15 Ratti, C., PulseIli, RM., Willitzms, S. & Frenchman, D., Mobile landscapes: using
location data from cell phones for urban analysis. Environment and Plmtning B: Planning
and Design, 33(5), pp. 727-748,2006.
City out of cham

perturbations caused efects on a large scale, affecting the functioning .of


part of the system or its overdl structure. For example, events such as
the opening of a shopping enter or adivation of a public tmmport
system can cause changes in the organization of large parts of urban
systems. The effectsof closing a road or of the hours of the bar with the
best coffee in town can be s e a to cause significant variations in the
p r d e of a whole area.
No big brother hid behind the inbentions of this research. The aim
of the stady was not to spy on users or encourage policies of control of
people's lives but to conbol h a n systems. The scale of obslemation was
that of vasf mban areas; atkention was focus& on the evdution of the
social system and emerging collective pmperh. This overall viw can
be interpreted as a tangible expression of overall organization of a
communi~of thousands of persons living and moving in a city.

Figure 23: Sequences of numbers recorded by mobile telephone operators.

vve were excited when we first saw the results of application to a


regional system, though we had known what to expect. In a moment
of enthusiasm, watching the sequences of numbers and the naps they
generated, we seemed to have discovered a sort of DNA, a code that
~ o b i geographies
h 107

somehow hid the secret of city life. We allowed ourselves this illusion
for a few minutes.

Study of a vast area: the case of Pescara and adjacent


Adriatic coast

The Siena research group conducted a case study on the regional


system of Pescara and part of the Adriatic coasG6 The aim was
to visualize the dynamics of mobility on a large regional scale in a
metropolitan-type area, a system comprising city and infrastructures.
The area measured about 960 km2 and included 40 km of coast.
The data recorded by 110 mobile phone radio bases consisting of
319 antennae covering the study area was used. The shape of the cells
and their distribution were determined, after which phone traffic was
monitored for 154 days in consecutive series spread over the four
seasons of 2006, for a tokid of 3696 hours.
A first quantitative analysis of the data expressed the obvious
phenomenon that conrmsdri~activity is concentrated in the daytime
and tapers of3 at night &3. 24). Qemly the city is alive in the day
and a h o d c o m p 1 dead~ at night. Activity was particularly low on
Sundays and there was always a drop in the number of c& around
3 p.m., revealing a custom or habit of the population, which probably
coincides with an interruption of activity in the early afternoon.

Figure 24: Activity curve (number of telephone calls) over 72 hours of a


weekday, a Saturday and a Sunday.

16Pulselli, RM. & Romano, P., Dinmnlche della MiMitd U h . S&& del Sisitnnn
h4etruplifano di Pescma e della Zona Costiera. Cogeatre: Pescara,2008.
City out of chaos

The f a d s were told even more explicitly by projecting the series of maps
in rapid succession, as if they were images of a moving object shot at
regular intervals. These dynamic maps made it possible to observe the
overall corifiguration of the population in the metropolitan system
and reveal their habits. The general organization of the regional system
emerged at a glance as the intensity of the geodemographic profile
varied over the 24 hours of a day.
In the case of Pescara, intensity varied in a regular manner, repeating
every 24 hous during the week with variations on weekends. In the 24-h
sequence of a spring weekday (someframes are shown in Fig. 25),we see
an acceleration of activity in the early morning that shows how the city
starb up. Activity continues increasing to a m a x h m around 10 am,
remahbg relatively constant until 7 or 8 p.m. The re& of the evening
shows a slowing of activity as the city winds down for the night.

Figure 25: M e s of activity maps m n d Pescara on a spring weekday from


morning to night. The rivers Tavo and Pescara are indicated as
geographical references.

Comparison of the sequences of diff:erent days of the week (weekdays


and weekend) and months of the year (seasons) showed similar
overall phone traffic on weekdays of spring, autumn, and winter. There
were substantial differences in summer (Fig. 26). The 24-h sequence
recorded in mid-August showed that activity began later (9-10 a m ) and
reached greater intensity almost uniformly along the coast, no longer
concentrated in Pescara. Activity also continued longer into the night,
especially along the coast, diminishing a s late as 2-3 a.m.
Dm a

. ,
The monitoring results delineated phenomena coherent with the
morphological and urban profile of the region. The patterns expressed
by intensity of activity revealed much frequented areas corresponding
to nodes of the metropolitan system and poles of attraction. In the
overall picture, areas with high intensity coincided with the main
centers and urban areas between towns.These transverse areas largely
mirrored the two valleys of the rivers Pescara and Tavo. A longitudinal
axis with high frequentation also mirrored the 40 km of coast. By
contrast, an absence of any sigruficant activity was observed in inland
mountain areas. Fig. 27 shows a diagram of the geodernographic
configuration of the overall regional system.
About 1,800,000 calls were recorded in the study area, 1,862,401
on a spring weekday and 1,787,661 (4% fewer) on a summer weekday.
The 24h data was also grouped by area to observe the percentage
distribution of activity in the various parts of the study area. Quantitative
analysis confirmed what had been deduced from the maps. In three
seasons of the year, about 70% of activity was concentrated in the coastal
belt with intensity maxima and along the two valleys.
In summer, there was a further increase in intensity in coastal
localities and a reduction in the center of Pescara and along the two
valleys. Indeed, on a spring weekday, 50% of activity of the whole
area was concentrated in a narrow coastal belt. This rose to 65% in
summer. In this strip of land, the number of calls increased from
City wt of c h s

936,960 in spring to 1,146,592 in summer, an increw of 22%, mostly


due to a massive influx Qf tourists. These observatim prompted more
detail& study of the COW belt ~Iudingthe dty of Pescara.

P i p r e 27: Number of phone calls md their percentage distribution in the


-
study area: left values recorded on a spring weekday; right -
values recorded on a summer weekday.

Fig. 28 shows some frames extracted from the 24h sequences of a


spring weekday in the coastal belt only. The images show the evolution
of activity during the day reflecting the general disposition of the
population in the main coastal towns (from the south: Francadla,
Pescara, Montesilvano, Silvi, Pineto).
In summer, this scheme changed and the distribution of activity
extended to the whole of the coast, instead of being concentrated
City out of chaos

in Pewma and Mmtesillvano. The data shows that the percentage


increase with respect to other seasons occurred mainly in coastal areas
that haw m y hotel beds.F i i 29 shows the patferns of 24h activity
of a spring weekcday and a summer weekday.

Figure 29: 24-h activity patterns recorded on a spring weekday (top) and a
summer weekday (bottom).

In spring, 64% of activity was h a t e d in Paara and 36% was spread


along the c-. In summer, thispattern wtas inverted with 39%of activity
recorded m Pescara and 61% spread along the coast Fig. 30 shows the
diagram of 24h summer variations with respect to spring. The reduction
in activity in Pescara and the increase along the c m t emerges clearly.
The bands are disposed in relation to the geographical position of tom
from south to north.
This study was u d d for testing the possibility of monitoring
population mobilty through mobile phone cells. The results of the research:
were significant la describing the organization of a metropob-
system around the city of Pescara The geodemographic profile of the
Mobile geographies 113

region was investigated for evolution in time and relationships between


its parts (major towns and minor centers) of the metropolitan system. The
aim was to obtain an extended view of the region that superseded local
contexts. This systemic approach is a valid premise for developing new
monitoring tools, aided by technology and based on spatiaI and temporal
parameters, to guide the choices of fuWe regional plans and programs.

Figure 30: Variation in intensity of activity between summer and spring.17

Study of a metropolitan area: the case of Milan


In another study, population Ctynarmcs in the metropolitan area of
Milan18 were investigated. The area was 400 km*(20 x 20 km2) served by
232 radio bases and 232 cells. Fig. 31 shows a series of frames extracted
from a 24-h sequence of the metropolitan area of Milan on a spring

17 A variation of -0.6 indicates that the summer figure is reduced by six-tenths with
respect to the spring figure (where there were 10,000 people there are 4000); similarly, a
variation of 0.9 indicates that the summer figure increased by nine-tenths, ie., almost
double (where there were 10,000 persons there are now 19,000).
"JPdselli, RM., Romano, P., Ratti C., and Tiezzi, E., Computing urban mobile
landscape through monitoring population density based on cell-phone chatting.
international ] m a 1 of Design 6 Nature and Ecodynamics, 3(2), pp. la-134,2008; Pulselli,
RM., Romano, P., Ratti, C., and Tie& E., The ecology of the urban landscape and the
chemistry of the aty. Abitare la Terra, 16, pp. 3045,2006.
114 City out of chaos

weekday. The conformation of activify was almost stable from 10 a.m. to


6 p.m. but diffemnt canfiguratims emerged in the late afternoon
evening and early morning.

Figure 31: Series of maps of radio base activity in the metropolitan area of
Milan: spring weekday from morning to night.
I

Application of the method to the highly urbanized city of Milan revealed


a more direct correspondence with real phenomena. In some cases, we let
the maps tell us the story, fact, or event, It was like experiencing known
situations from a very unusual perspective. Sometimes we allowed
ourselves to be carried by events and we found ourselves involved in a
demonstration in a square, a concert, a soccer match at the stadium, or a
celebration.
The four frames of Fig. 32 tell the story of 2 May 2004. That Sunday,
Milan played Rome at the stadium of San Siro. At 1 p.m., there was
intense activity around the stadium (circle).At 3 p.m., after the start of the
match, activity was much lower. The spectators were presumably too
involved to be making phone calls. At 4.45 p.m. Milan had officially won
and the image at 5 p.m. eloquently describes the explosion of enthusiasm
and celebrations. At 7 p.m., the fans were all in the center around Piazza
del Thomo.
Mobile geographies 115

Figure 32: Milan, 2 May 2004. Soccer match at the stadium (circle upper left
in the first three images) and celebration of the shield in the center
(drcle in fourth image).

The art of cartography

It may not be a coincidence that this chapter began with a work of


a contemporary art. For us, Hendricks's newspaper played the role
expected of a work of art, namely to propose an unconventional view
and convey meaning intuitively through p&vocation or suggestion. That
experiment led to something completely different in content, tecluuque,
? and scale, though with something in common. The maps had big marks
f in strange shapes and bnght-graded colors (here scales of gray), that told
5
i1 a story, that of a metropolitan system permeated by people, day by day,
in different ways and with different timing. What emerged was an
?' overall form, a 'unique organization,' a view of a phenomenon that was
City out of chaos

~ i n p i g i ~ . ~ ~ s e q z a e t ~ c e s ~ p r ~ o n a ~ h
rapid wmsdm, cmW0tls xncw- emerged in which day followed
nightand~folbweciday.L l s i n a ~ d o n o . ~ i n ~ ~ , 1 9
ew~c~da~gddynanrici~.Wewauldrsrdbesurp~
toseegoneofh~p~inamwum
hmcase,Wiswhath+.ANavYmkdty~+wias
h m a t * M ~ d ~ A r t h m ~ t i m ~
N e w Y~ T a J k ~ ~ b y ~ ~ e ~ ~ L a b .
co* m y iypm of irlhmlation ~~
cQnnecticmg between
New York d the rest of the plane&&.siafls between dty di&W&
a n d w i & ~ d ~ ~ d c ~ t s , ~ d ~
ommhghfhe~Edjn&cgllrsedaday~hz&r~M.
Om way of ~ e3 l"
e s en.
w
these pbo- was k, process data on
inf~nraationexhaqp via l i b web, considering the &n of bits
trans- In the words of Cmlo &titi,* direcbr of SEMSb1e
City Lab:
Considering the flow of bits at a planetary level is like looking at a
river @om a distance; it is not about tracing individual particles but
about s u q n g the entire stream. The seeming simplicity of [...] data
format conceals some very complex dynamics that exist behueen Nau
York and cities around the world. To reveal these complexities, we
decided to create two difirent types of visualizations. The flrst one
nims to show New York's global connections to the international
network of cities - a kind of 'globalization in real time'. The second
type of visualization zooms inside New York City's jive boroughs and
erplmes hopv gbbal connections wry in difirent nefgkbourhoods a -
kind of 'globalizationfrom the bottom'.

"Magnat& A , Marchettini, N., &tori, S, R@ C,,Roasi, F., Rustici, M., Spalla, 0.&
Tiezzi, E., C h W waves and pattern hnatim in the l I 2 - d i p ~ t o y l - s n ~ y ~ 9
phosphocholine/water lamellar system J. Am. Chem. Soc., 126, pp. 11406-11407,~;
MarchetW, N., Rlsturi, S., Rossi, F. 6r Rustid, M., An experimental model for
mi&cldng &logical systems: The Babv-** reactfcw in lipid membrms.
Inw& Journal of Ecodynanzics~1(1), pp. 55-63,#X)6.
Ratti, C., New Ywk talk exdwqe. New York Tdk Exchange, eds. F.M.Rojas, C. Celdesi
V M , K K & C.Raiti, SAP Press: New York, 2008.
Figure 33: An image of the project Nau York Talk Exchange: connection of
New York with the rest of the world via WEB.

We concluded this chapter with a visit to an art gallery because we liked


to think that art and science share romantic passion and that cartography is
the most scient$c art and the most artistic science, as obsewed by the
American traveler and novelist Paul Edward Theroux. This is particularly

21 Ratti, C., New York talk exchange. N m York Talk Exchange, eds. F.M.
Rojas, C. Celdesi
Vderi, K Kloeckl & C. Ratti, SAP Press: New York, 2008.
City art of chaos

s@&cant when new hon'Z011~ are opened by evolutionary sciences


c m c d with system dynamics. According to Franco Farbdli,22 in this
new dimension,'the objed of geography and the mind of the geographer
move again, no longer chained to a lifeless and immobile cartographic
model of the world.'
Escher's stairs

Fwe to move! is a radio advertising slogan for powerful, high-performance


cars with all comforts. It made us smile the first time we heard it because
we were trapped in a car in a traffic jam. Like other motorists around us,
we were in a powerful car full of sophisticated instmmnts, comfortable
but immobile. We were in a genuine oxymoron, not metaphorical but
real. Our freedom of movement was prevented by immobile mobility. By
getting in each othefs way, a great number of cars limited each other's
freedom to move.
Contradictions of this kind are not uncommon in contemporary cities.
Besides mobility, there are other situations in the town planning
technological, social, economic, and cultural fields - an situations
apparently out of control. We want more accessible, more beautiful,
cleaner cities with better architecture, transport, and services, but apart
from a few valid initiatives, cities grow quantitatively day by day, almost
always at the expense of quality. We update our computers with

1 This chapter is the work of Riccardo Maria Puklli and Federico Maria Pulselli,
supervised by Esrzo Tiezzi. Parts were taken directly from Chapter VI of Pulseli,F.M.,
Bastiammi, S., Marchettini, N. & Tiezzi, E., % Road to Sustainability - GDP and Future
Generations. WIT Press: Southampton, 2008. In that case, reference to the film 7% Cube
illustrated our reflections on the economic system.
City cmt of chaos

sophisticated software because we want to optimize our work and


save time but the hours spent in front of the screen increase instead
of decreasing. We build bigger and bigger companies in pursuit of
improved performance through scale economies but the results are
increasingly aleatory and impersonal, while contact with clients and
responsibility are lost in a maze of apathetic employees. We want to
promote meritocracy but the result is rigid impersonal methods of
assessment and selection Thus we fuel a system of competitive intolerant
doers incapable of collaborating or demonstrating enthusiasm. We forget
schools of thought and the roles of teacher and student. We do not
recognize professionality but lean on standardized methods, sequential
proceduresI regdations, documents, declarations, and rubber stamps.
Professionals are bureaucrats in a world defined by jurisprudence. We
want to favor talent but prefer consensus, and nobody wants to listen to
new ideas. We want to stop war but our fadories produce and sell
weapons.
Faced with such striking contradictions, traditional urban, economic,
and administrative disciplines are in great difficulty and proving to be
completely inadequate. The more power they have, the less able they
are to use it They reject any responsibility for the parts they play in the
social environmental and cultural consequences of the gmwth they
continue to pursue. Their foundations tremble, and as the world they
govern mhes headlong towards infinity,they find themselves always at
he same point, pursuing growth, like the famous stairs of &her
conceived to trick the mind.
The urban system is managed by operational instruments at different
lwels: on a vast or local scale, by sector or regionally. Functions and
infrastructures are organized through plans, regulations, invariantsI
and standards. Besides this rational part, cities also have a dynamic factor
(budt environment, ecosystems, individuals, groups, organizations,
administrations) in which humam are the dominant component. In
Chapter 07, we saw that this combination makes cities complex systems
which can sometjmes behave in unexpected ways. Because of the
complexity ofhuman systems, the grandiose view of progressive town
planners and the dream of totalitarian architeds can no longer find
the complete answers it expected. Tools of t om planning, e c o n o ~ ,
and administration have proven inadequate for the task of managing
complexity in the social urban context. They lack the strength to direct
future regional development in determined directiom. To illustrate this
concept as a starhg point for reforming these Wplines, we were
inspired by r fantasy thriller, a cult f
ilmfor enthusiasts of the genre.

Figure34 Ascending and descending - lithograph by Maurits Cornelius


Escher, 1960.

The Cube

The first of the seven guests of the Cube is sliced up into many small
dice. In a flash. In the span of a few frames. Viewers are just allowed a
City out of c k o s

moment of perplexed terror before the blades sink with inexorable


indifference and the guest is reduced to a pile of pieces. Goodl With
such a winsome prologue, spectators are immediately sucked into the
vortex of the film.
The plot of Cube2 is simple. Six people and more than a thousand
pieces of a seventh (the one who was sliced) are confined to a box full
of traps, like a Rubik's cube. According to one of the many reviews,
'Allknowable space is represented by the cube; all the time they have
to get out of the trap is sanctioned by physiological needs. Three days
and three nights without eating and dfinlcine; me enough to thrmten
anyone's d v a l . A perfect Molq@ deadIine.'3
~ p ~ o f t h e ~ ~ b e ~ f r o m m y ~ ~ a n d
~ ~ t o ~ y ~ ~ ~ ~ p e ~ p l e f i n d ~ m i n
a n d ~ ~ I t $ I n ~ ~ t o ~ e ~ ~ ~
a s e p i t i c ~ ~ b y e s r o r ~ ~ h ~ d ~ g ~ , a ~ . u n a f
six~quaitoFhen~of~>:anidremthgtomth~tical
logic: t h e w a y o u t i s d i s K : ~ ~ e r e d b y ~ ~ & e n t l e s o f t h e ~ d
solving the riddle. The Cube is a system that obeys reducible Jle hm,
which are h & r e d&erminaC and predictable. At khe same %be,
l+#meverr, tkere me six pexsmmb, which soon Ixl&f& bfiiure,
tmpeeWaMc betravim under the plesswre of a h d l e mvimmnmt The
~ofm~alseleetioninaclosedbxcaea~~si~.
The character who seams the strongest is overcome by emofion, cannot
cgnm2 the sitmtlon and adapt - he loge%his head. An autbfk boy has
tb@ties~~sur\live~~~C~.~erndtr,leadthe
others out, and manages well with their help. From a purely scientific
and unromantic viewpoint the plot of the f ilm m o b around
adaptation and selection. The strength of the film is the combination of
few essential elements:an aseptic environment and a group of strangers.
A h x (non-living) that obeys mechanical laws combined with the
personalities and emotions of the characters (living) gives rise to an

2 Cube. Directed by V h c m m Natali Triaark Pictu,re~,Canada 1997.


3 Firovano, F., 1999.In http://www.revisioncinema.cm/aci~be.htm
Indeterminacy 123
i n k m e .sequenceof unqected events and emergi~g novelties. The Cube
can &mefore be a metaphor for the system of rule, medmnisms, and
cogs of human systems (urban, social, and economic). It is assembled on
the basis of mti0nal criteria and acts like a machine. The rooms in the
Cube contain differertt obstacles, as different rules and methods are
applied in di&!rent states and regions of the world. The characterscannot
escape from the Cube because society and local communities cannot
escape from the global economic system Society can only exist inside
the Cube. There are no alternatives for anyone, not even for the tiny
conmmnity of Mapuche in southern Patagonia. The whole story takes
place in the Cube and the behavior of individuals creates undefftanding
or disagreement, separation or conflict The assembled box follows
its inexorable course and the prisoners suceumb to the rigidity of its
structure. Paradoddy, the autistic boy, who ean prrocess itdonnation in
a linear manner, as required by Cube mechnks, and is helped by the
&, is the me who h d s the way out The narrow margim of salvation
allowed by the Cube, which represents the rigid schemes of the eammty,
asweseeit,ltttsfew~ge,andthecharacters'emo;tiansIdiuers@,and
though&are evidently ineconcilablewith cubism The Cube is a law unbo
itself and unable to respond to the living compcmient of the society" it m
rigidly controk. In such a situation, the sfx prisoners haw to leslrn its
rules and take advantage of what they know in order to escape. F w d
with an hexorable machine, the instinct to survive h d s them into crises,
competition, iniquity, disagreement, and loss. The result is a complex
stmy, a devastating plot.

Emergence of novelty

The spectator is absorbed by the plot but feels little sympathy for
the fate of the characters; rather, he tries to find the solution and to
understand why the characters became trapped in the Cube. No
answer is offered but there is much food for thought.
City out of chaos

The external observer asks who built the Cube and why? A
plausible conclusion could be to name the designer, a cynic who
exercises power in an arbitmy way. (Let us ignore Martians!) This
howeva would be a pointless conspiracy, a conha&ction of terms.
Another e x p b t i o n springs from sharper reasoning and fine logic.
When one of the characters comes to the dramatic realization that he
was one of the designers of a section of the Cube, an important due is
revealed. What is the Cube? The Cube is the result of many unrelated
prwsses, small pieces commissioned by an unknown society and
conceived by specialists who do not know each other, the overall
design, or the find result of their work.
Who built the Cube? A possible answer is arerybady and nobody. In
other w d , the process of formation of the Cube could be a m p l a
process that was activated, ran its cause, and concluded auton~m>usly
by a fatal ccrmbination of choices and h c e . The characters would
therefore be the unfortunate victims of an independent system larger
than thsslselw.
The process of c o ~ c t i o nof the Cube that we are discussing
dmulates the evolution of a complex system having uncontrolled
0ut~ome6and m y nat be science fidion. The co~wsrudionof a Cube is
nat an unlikely or improbable event in real life. The honest work of the
eqgimer imgriscrned in the Cube (irony of fate!) with the other charactars
due to his high spedizati~n,does not n e c d y mean that he knows
the final aim of the product, whether it be a children's hospital or a war
machine (or a cubic prison). His work is merely to exercise his sp&
skills to perfechon. Direct communication between the parts of the
process is not required. Certain parts of the process nay have interacted
and become a spontaneous process or system by a series of expedients
and favorablechmmtances.
This is possible, especially when the inmediate task of the parts is to
find out haw to receive an input from the system, make a transformation
and get the system to make an output, at the same time making a profit.
This description is familiar in modern economics. The mechanism,
uneontroIled by any observer with an overan view of the system, is a
possible demiption of the merely utilihrkm cause that gemrates
monsters, such as the Cube. It is not the sleep of reason but the dreams of
reason that create monstem.4
To demonstrate this, we have to use a specific science that sustains
that the system-process exists and can take a recognizable form
different from the identity of any of its parts. This comepnt was clearly
expressed by Pascal, 'The whole is more than the sum of its parts,' taken
up by Ludwig von B e r t d d f y ? Prigogine and others, and forms a basis
of modern chaos and complex system theory (Chapter 03).
Such systems enjoy properties that cannut be predicted from
reductive observation of their components. The whole system must be
observed in order to apprehend its behavior, because every part of
the system depends on the others by direct and indirect connections.
The presence of irreducible systems is coherent with Gadel's theorem,
which states that it is impossible to give a detailed, complete, and
comprehensible description of the world. Most natural system
are izreducible, which places strong restrictions on the intrinsic
reductionism of science. According to GOdells thmrem, the properties
of order and mergence cannot be observed or known from h i d e the
system, only by an external obsmr.6
In a complex systemI inberxtions between pats are aften highly
spdalizxd and may trigger effects on a large scale, even those due
to local phenomena. The more complex and characterized by
interdependence of its parts ( o h highly specialized) a system is, the
more librely it is that effects, which may be due to local phenomena,
are felt on a large scale.
Collective behavior with new properties, that elude the control and
understanding of individuals, may emerge as an effect of interactions

"Tie&, E., Beauty and Science. WIT Press, Southampton 2005.


5 Van k k h f f y , L,General Sygtetn Tkory. Penguin Books, Hammdsworth, 1972,
6 S e e Tie*, E., Step$ T R Wan~Evolutionary Physics. W Frees: Soutfiampbm, 2OU6,
-
espedaUy First Step On giants' shoulders: A new epistemologicalinsight.
City out of chaos

between the different social, economic, technological, and physical


components. For example, new infrastructures, adoption of a ~~
of rub, or a s l a c k d g market may redefine the behavior of an entire
urban system and community.
M e r i n g the above, we can assume that the Cube is a set of
rndanhms produced by the economic system and contemporary
society. In the name of growth and progress, the economy and
-logy advance inexorably, sustained by research and false well-
bhg, on a path that does not envisage any limits. The pursuit of
immediate profit promoted by the Western model is increasingly
divorced h a n an overall view of the common good, and thus from
the r d Werests elf individuals, from real well-being. This presumed
common goal h become ambiguous and not in everyone's interests,
but only in the interests of some.
Accmding to the view of Adam Smith, by pursuing their pe&
interest, hdividuzits autQmaticicayland unknowingly act in the interest
of dl, as guided 4 an invisible hand. The theory of complexity
shows that this concept is completely untrue. It is diffintt to imagine
the &ats of the work of a Wall Street broker, who operates directly
on the cogs of the economic system when he celebrates a day of high
profits in a bar in Greenwich Village. In extreme cases, his action
may msm the prosperow s&d d a company or the closure 04
a faatory, the ruin of a community and the destitution of fadory
emplayem.
The metaphor of the Cube suggests that traditional control systems
of society and the economy are out of control. Many solid facts 2llso
suggest this, by the same mechanism that created the Cube. Our cities
j6unmed with cars are an example: public transpod is rendered
imfficimt by too many cars and by our obstinacy incontinuing to sell
and buy more cars because they represent freedom and autonomy.
Unequal distribution of planetary wealth, the increasing gulf
between rich and poor, great financial crashes, economic crises, public
debt, global environmental crisis, the effects of global warning and
Indeterminacy 127

climate change, depletion of water resources, and devastating wars


are only some of the mechanisms represented by the metaphor of the
Cube. They are results of a system that obeys its own laws and eludes
all control.
We wish that society never built the Cube and we wish there were no
wars, but it is not easy to understand what complex mechanisms of
the economic system underlie a war, what combinations of personal
inkrest, self-organizing phenomena, and nonlinear amplification involve
thousands of pexsons, despite themselves, in useless devastating conflicts.
If we could control these complex LnechaniSms, we could avoid harming
ourselves, we could arrest the building of small cubes at any moment, we
could dismantle the walls of the global Cube in which we live.

More flexible tools


Economics with its rules that involve other disciplines transversely, is
largely responsible for the negligence and shortsightedness of the
instruments of control of human systems. The mechanics of traditional
economics configures a system that is a law unto itself, heedless of
corxununity and individual well-being. The contradictions of the
economic system are the basis of the Cube, which represents the set of
rm&anisms that regulate socialbehavior and are not always knowingly
determined. The Cube is the unexpected product of a process generated
autonomously in a complex system, as are the social and economic
systems. In these systems, in turn, interactions between dynamic
elements and static normative apparatus generate phenomena that
individuals cannot control and that are not easily arrested, such as war or
the current environmental crisis. The greenhouse effect and fear of
terrorism which afflict the whole human race are results of a system
of rules and behaviors adopted by the global village, which in turn
impose new constrictions on the village (e.g., the urgent need to reduce
emissions of greenhouse gases to prevent climate change and blanket
security measures to prevent terrorist attacks). The Cube is a set of
City out of chaos

nxles a d nechanigms d e k m h d by contemporary society but their


hkwadhs with living agents are not easy to detemhe and cause
Mboscks, which affectsociety in a complex way.
The architect R e m Piano7 has no doubts: 'Modernity, progress,
and growth are infernal traps and we continue to be cheated in
their name.'
Paced with the need to investigate the world and the enormous
variety of organizational, regulatory, and adaptive solutions e n c o u n ~
in d dynamics, nature and life, we have to change the type of
questions we were a c c u s t o d to asking. Hurmnbd has to urgently
tackle peat problems that threaten the survival of the spedes, problems
that transcend the intrinsic utility of the imtmmm.ts of 'tradi&md
economics and redudionist science.
The sciences of evolutionary processes clamor to investigate
concatenated and nonlinear processes that cause novelties to emerge
in systems. More in general, the transition from classical deterministic
science to complexity theory and evolutionary sciences is revealing a
new panorama and new perspectives for disciplines concerned witb
human systems. As sustained by Marcello Cini, the epistemologd
priority of the categories simplicity, order, regularity, and remmibility is
being superseded in favor of the opposite categ~riescomplexity,
disorder, c h s , and irreversibility, when it is impossible to reduce
the latter to the former in order to attain a more satisfactory
understanding of the world.8

7 Cited in Tie* E. & Cassigoli, R,I Vmti e la Rotta. Dinlogo sulla Terra nel XXZ Secolo.
Polistampa, Harence 2000.
8 Cini, M.,%awe Naturdi e Cultura Ecologica. (Ed) Tiezzi, E., Emlogin e ... Laterza,
Roma-Bari 1995.
Chaos and design

The design of MAXM, the National Museum of twenty-first Century Art


(Fig. 35) is both fascinating and dmpeting. It is disquieting because it
breaks with the c o n w of the city, declaring its extraneousness to Roman
architecture and irreverently manifesting its uniqueness.It is fascinating
because Zaha Hadid, the architect that designed it, conceived the fonn as
a weave of bundles of lines and curves running in different directions.
MAXM is conceived as a node in a network, as if it were the image of
potential interactions it c d d establish with other elements in the
immediate wban context and in remote places. On the site, these
interactions are many and intense and take the form of flows that
interweave, overlap, cross each other. It is as if they were frozen in the
u n d and surprising form of a self-organized fluid that simulates the
steady state of a far-fromequilibrium system. The information, energy,
and materials, like the artists and visitors of different nationalities, are
brought together in MAXXI, a new portal connecting Rome to the rest of
the world.
That the distance between art and science may be fine is often
demonstrated by an act of creation, a work of art, an architecturalproject
What have explained up to here with reference to complexity theory,
130 City out of chaos

dissipative structures, diagrams, variable patterns, mobile geographies,


models, and calculations, emerges just as eloquently in this drawing.
Hadid's composition is strongly s e . His architecture combines a
project with a random, arbitrary component, as if the project were the
result of a: process that imitates the creativity of nature. The complexity
that generates the forms of MAXXI is a dynamic balance between order
and chaos based on the same rules that govern dissipative systems in the
universe. Refledinp; on the complicity between art and science, Albert
Einstein observed that if we try to describe our experience within a
logical framework we enter the realm of science; if the relations between
the forms of our representation elude rational understandmg but
nevertheless m a n k t their mearting intuitively, we enter the realm of
artistic creation. What the two worlds share is an aspiration for the
universal,for the non-arbitrary.

A new system of measurement for architecture

When Le Corbusier composed the modulm in the 195% he wanted to


'find the ideal proportions that would enable designers to keep the
human scale in mind in the age of machines.' He continued:
Chaos and design 131
Coexistma implies dwaE&j or multiplicity and a m s e w t l y calls jbr
proportlans and chmsonaztces. What sort of consottcmces? T h e existing
between ourselaes and our environment, betuleen the spirit of man and
the. spirit of things, between mathematics as a human inmtion and
mathematics as fke secret of the universe. [...I we are more likely to
h s e the best mmre~fientsi f wa can see rthm, appraise them with
actstretched hands, not m l y imagine them.
In the age ofmachim, Le Corbier proposed the solutim to a need of the
time, namely to render uniform the use of space and the new accessories
that technology offered in the realm of housing. The aim was to offer
performance that met the needs of every function, attempting to b e the
main problem (&ciiency and optimization of space and operating times)
for produetion as well as use of goods. His proposal consisted in
i d e n m g the relations between humaa activities and the context
inwhichfheywereercercisd,bydefiningpPopmtivmsandm~~~
research starbed by meauring movements and behavior wsed to perform
an activity.
Whatever we d the age of today (post-indwtdd, electronic, or
the age of glozralization), the problems have c&y changed.
However, they still mncern the proportions and consonances between
human activity and the setting in which it occurs, albeit in a broader
sense. Indeed, we have to consider the movements of our daily Eves
and evaluate their effects on the environment, that is the source of
resources m d the meptacle of wastes. If in Le Corbusids day it was
necessary to find a common procedure for designing efficient living
space; today it is necessary to coordinate efforts towards rational use
of energy and environmental resources in order to reconcile hunan
activities and natural cycles, resource withdrawal rates an8 rates of
regeneration, mathma#cs as a human invention and mathematics as the
secret of the uniume: two problems (that of Le Carbusier and our
problem today) with different terms but a common conceptual matrix.
The same principle ltolds for both, the prhciple according to which we
are more IzMy to c M e the best measurements if we can see them, appraise
them with outstre2ched hands, not mewly imagine them.
City out of chaos

To lcnow the ~ e l a t i wbetween humans and the built or natural


environment, it is necesemry to find a functional scheme and try to see
and measure it. This was the prerogative of Odum's theory of energy
systems, visualized by diagram (Chapter 05), and flows and stocks
of energy, measured as emergy (Chapter 06). By this approach, we
can make a diagram, for example, of the processes of construction,
maintenance, and use of a building, and guantify them. In this way,
we derive a more complete interpretation of architecture.

Figure 36: Ertergy +rn diagram of the construction, maintenance, and use
d a building.

A building is an a r t i f i d stock of resources coming directly or in.drrectly


from the environment Construction of a building requires intensive use
of m&teriaLs and energy, that is flows that form a permanent stock. In
other words, in the phase of constructian, a a V s of energy and matter
con~e~~mthesjtewheretheyareusedtonaakemder,togiveformtoa
strustut.e, to assemble parts. In Fig. 36, the building is represented by
the tank symbol to indicate a stock of resources that persists in time.
Chaos and design

Construdion, w h maberials are assembled by exploiling energy, is


indicated by the interaction symbol. The flows involved in consguction
indicate an initial h v m t of natural capital lasting the life of the
buildjng.
The second inferadion symbol repreents maintenance of the
building which absorbs a ciertain quantity of flows each year. The flows
may be discontinuow, according to necessity. The resomes used in
thisstage are needed to prevent entropic degradation of the building. In
theory, the input to the tank compensaM the output flow (arrow to
heat sink) and maintains the quality of strudural organization. Without
this input, the building would f d to ruin,which amounts to an increase
in entropy. This spontaneous process by which order degenerates into
disorder is demibed in the second law of themodynamics (Chapter 01)
and is evident in buildings abandoned for long periods. The ruined
appearance of such buildings is an inevitable consequence of the
absence of activity and maintenance: something like a loss syndrome
that CUTiwly affects buildings as well as people,
Use of fie building also calls for resources. Other flows, such as
water, electricity, and natural gas, obtained by connection to various
networks, sustain the activity carried m inside, without considering
f o d , clothes, funitwe, books, appliances, and so forth.
h a recent study? researchers at Sienol Univexsity did m emergy
analysl of the cof19&ctionI maintenance of use of a four-sborey
residential building. The mmt common current b u i l h g m&o& in
Europe were considemk foundations and frame in reinforced
concrete, floors in brick and concrete, walls in hollow bricks, exterior
in stone and aluminum windows.
The emergy going into the construction of a building of this type
was 1.07 x l O B sej/m3. This value included all the flows of materials
and energy needed for constmction. Foundations and frame took 41%

'PuEselli RM., Siaumcini E., Wel&F.M. dr Bashmi, S., Emergy d y s b of


w g -g, ntaintemme and uae: B m - M m housing
~ to~waluate
sustainabiliiy. Energy m d Buildings, 39(5), pp. 620-628,2067.
City out of chaos

of this quantity, the walls, ground floor, foundations, and roof took
20%and the other floors and internal work and finishing 35%.
The percentage of emergy attributed to materials was also calculated
and expressed per cubic meter of building. Every material has a spedfic
emergy (in @/kg), an intrinsic quantity that expresses its 'environmental
werghf (Chapter 06). For example2 1 kg of cement has an emergy of
3.04 x 1012 st$ the same weights of concrebe, aluminum, bricks, and wood
have emergies of 1.81x 1012sej, 213 x 1012 sej, 3.68 x 1012sej, and 2.4 x 1012
sej, respectively. The quantity of materials used for consbzrction is
d e r essential aspect for emergy analysis, since sustainability analysis
is based on extensive quantities (Chapter 06). In the case of modem
builchgs, the most widely used mattxial is concrete. In a cubic meter of
building, there b about 260 kg of concrete, 76 kg of bricks/tiles, 21 kg
of mortar, 11kg of plaster, 10 kg of stone,8 kg of steeland about 10 kg of
other materials. The concrete amounts k, 4.8 x 1014 sej/m3 (about 45%
of the total), bricks/tiles 2.8 x 1014sej/m3 (about 26%),mortar and plaster
1.1x 1 0 4 sej/m3 (about lo%),steel 5.5 x 1013 sej/m3 (5%),stone 6.3 x 1013
sej/m3 (6%),and paint 29 x 1013 sej/m3 (3%).Human work accounts for
2.2 x 1013sej/m3 (about 2%),land use 4.7 x 1012 sej/d (0.5%), and setting
up the building site 3.6 x 1012 sej/m3 (0.4%).
These estimates regarding processes that have to do with houses
and living, and specifreally the various phases and components of
cafzstntction, were not done for their own sake. Emergy assessfnent
shows the relations M e e n human activity and nature, quan-g use
of environmental resoUTCeS, and revealing the weight of the different
phases of the process and the various elements of the systen Emergy
assessment extended to the subsequent phases of maintenance and use of
buildings has also shown that the ernergy equivalent of resources used
per year is 15.3 x 1016 sej and 6.76 x 1016 sej, respectively. In the overall
balance, the a d of living in buildings is sustained by an emergy flow of

2 RM.,Simoncini, E., Ridolfi, R L Bastianoni, S.,Specific emergy of cement and


concrete. An energy-based appraisal of building materials and their transport. EEvJlogbl
Indicators, 8, pp. 647456,2008.
Chaos and design 135

43.52 x 1016sej/year (assuminga mean building life of 50 years)#49% of


which is invested in constructionr 35% in maintenance and 15%in use.
The longer the life of a building, the lower the percentage ascribed to
construction. This makes conservation of buildings a bargain, from a
sustainabilitypoint of view.
In a parallel study? the researchers calculated the ecological
footprint (Chapter 02) of ecosystem resources and services appropriated
in the construction of a building. It emerged that the above four-storey
residential building with a floor plan of 160 m2 had a footprint of about
9400 global m2 (gmz)/year, calculaM considering the mean life of the
various matdab. The buildings footprint indicated the area occupied
indirectly for its construction, i.e., the area of land necessary to produce
the goods and services needed for construction.
Traditional planning control is based on the definition of limits.
These are generally established on the basis of formal criteria, such as
fractions of allotments that can be built on or proportions related to
land zoning type. Similarly, the ecological footprint calculates the
area of ecosystems committed to construction of the building with
respect to area occupied by the building. This information could be
used to develop a new index. A building constructed using low impact
techniques would have a lower footprint and could be incentivated by
permitting larger volumes. Buildings with high footprints could be
penalized by volume limits. The definition of new standards based on
sustainability indicators that consider consumption of natural resources
could regulate city expansion by posing a physical limit to its footprint.
This research set out to measure human impact on the environment
in a tangible way, through emergy, the ecological footprint or other
indicators. The need to do this felt by modern architecture remains a
priority among contemporary needs and problems, as it was for Le
Corbusier, albeit in a new form.

3Bastianon&S., Galli, A., Pulse& RM. & Niccolucci, V., Environmental and economic
evaluation of natural capital appropriation through building construction:Practical case
study in the Italian context Ambio, 36(7), pp. 559-565,2007.
City out of chaos

Conservation and restoration

The future development of cities and their long-term survival


depend first of all on conservation. As sustained by Gregory Bateson,'4
evolution without conservation is madness.' The profile of today's
cities evolved from yesterday's cities. In other words, today's condition
is the result of a combination of evolution and conservation, two
complementary forces, both present in the history and mechanisms of
contemporarycities.
The great variety of historical and modem architecture that
interweaves and overlaps in the fabric of cities is a tangible example of
this essential combination, especially when it leaves recognizable
signs in the building styles, urban lineaments, the patchwork of
neighborhoods from different periods. Contemplation of the parts of a
city that stratified over the years suggests that city profile evolved
dynamically, like a geological formation, compressed by the weight of
many factors. According to Paolo Portoghesi: 5
Cities and thar buildings do not arise on a sheet of paper but in the
emotion of&ling part of something that is born, graws and trmfirms,
and in the will to be worthy of living on the earth. The roots whose
direction and depth we do not know but Utat 'we fie1 under our
jbotsteps' &re Portoghesi quotes the Rorentine architect Michelucci)
help us to find the way to participate w'thout presumption in a
collective, choral enterprise.
It would be difficult to imagine the city as an unchanging machine,
designed, built, tuned, and defined once and for all. Cities are evolving,
having further thoughts about decisions already taken,constituting new
systems and activating new relations. This is in line with Portoghesi,6
when he wribx
In a perspective that brings humans closer to nature, erodes the divide
between natural and artificial, and sinks the illusion of human

4 Bateson, G., Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chandler: San Francisco,1972


5 Portoghesi, P., Editorial - L'angelo di Michelud. Abitare la Terra, 2(2), 2002.
6 Portoghesi, P., Nafura e Archifettwa. Skira: Milan, 1999.
Chaos and design 137
dominion, architecture, like &e result of transmtion of the Earth's
crust, becomes part of i&t'ri& &a1 mji and invertebrates
hiding in shells, like gardens built by b y r birds to ritualize mating,
like hem' dams constructed with injinite patience to create a domestic
space in the waters of a Tiver.

Cities conserve the memory of work, materials, and energy spent in


construction and maintenance, following an instinctive principle of
effidency, with the aim of prolonging the initial investment indefinitely.
The ordered structure of a city is somehow a steady state, that b
perp&mlevolution between past and future.
Assessment of a building in emergy terms and its Entqxe@.tion
through a systems diagram confirm this idea. A building is itself a
resource. Its repmentation as a stock suggests that the building can be
treated as a reserve of non-mmwa&I and hence dephMe:, amxmre.
Non-renewability is deduced fromthe use of non-renavable ccmstruction
~~, rmch as cmaeb and brick, hcludbg the f d s burnt to make
them, and sbne, inclu;dang the energy needed to extract it. In these awes,
the natural regeneratiion times ( s x h e n b q cycles) are infinitely long
conpared to extradon W. Moreover, current pr-es were not
c&ed to recycle or dismantle and reuse parts of buildings at the end
of theirlives.
The idea that a Mding is a reserve of invested natural capital
that can be maintained in time is an important cmceptual novelty.
Maintenance and reration, changes in use, modification6 and
additions are ways of conserving and rerraving the function of a
buildmg, in the sense of structure and urban function. In the case
of restmation of a b e d building, a moderate quantify of energy
and materials is tEreorettcally invested to reactha& a wn-dep1eked
resource that can continue to be exploited. We take it for ~~
that construction of new buildings is an irreversible action that
uses prevalently non-renewable resources, dividing and moving
them. However, in a future perspecfive, from today on, it is possible
to consider any building already existing a potentially mwwabke
resource that can be c m e d indefinitely. This also emerged from
138 City out of chaos

our calculations: the conservation of a building is a bargain from a


sustainability viewpoint.
What, then, is a sustainable city? A sustainable city is not a new city
built from scratch or the result of an enpeefs drawhg, but a system in
stready state, the energy inputs of which have already been stored and
assembled over the years and are best used talang care to minimize energy
inputs and entropy outputs (wastes? pollution, heat). Paraphrasing a
passage of the famous Brundtland report,7 the sustabbility of a city is not
a definitive condition of harmony, but rather a process of continuous
change and adaptation to make the orientation of development c o k t
withfutureaswellaspresentneeds.

Green architecture and town planning

Buildings consume 3040% of the natural resources used by


industrialized countries. Forty percent of the materials extracted from
queuTies and mines go mto constjruction. About 50%of the energy is used
for heating and air conditioning and 30%for other residential fundi<rms.
In Europe, the demand for energy for domestic uses and other urban
services is greater than that of transport and industry.
Today we hear much about enviranment-friendly architecture that
consumes less energy.Green buildings seek maximum efficiency in the
use of energy and materials, derive energy through natural passive
processes, use renewable, possibly local, materials, have limited impad
on natural cycles, especially water resourres, and seek to belong to and
continue local traditions (resources,landscape, society, culture, history).
Green buikhgs must also not exemphfy the 'paradox of Jevons.' As
we already said (Chapter06), Jevonsa observed that increased efficiency

7 WCED: World Commission on Environment and Development Our Common Future.


Oxford University Press: Oxford-New York, 1987.
8 JevmW ,.S.,77fe Coal Question:An Inquiry Conmming the Progress ofthe Nation, and fhe
Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-mines,3rd ed., eds. A.W. F l u . Augustus M. Kelley:
New York, 1905.
C h m and design 139
of machines due to techn01algical advances led to the use of less fuel
per unit product but that the overall industrial demand for coal in
Britain continued to increase, rather than decreasing. Economic use of
resources leads to greater consumption. Town planners often observe
this phenomenon. For example, when the capacity of an infrastructure
is increased (widening a road, increasing the size of a parking area), its
function improves but it also attracts more users. The itlitid gain in
effidency is often lost and congestion is re-established on a larger scale.
Tlzis problem is not foreign to green architecture. Although it is well
to test and apply increasingly efficient building techniquesand improve
performance during construction, maintenance, and use, it is important
not to lose sight of the main problem. Cities continue to grow i d they
cannot grow forever. The overall demand for energy and materiala by
the world population is increasing. This also emerges from the global
ecological footprint: the rate of comumptim of resources at world level
is greater than Uhe rate of regeneration (Chapter 02).
Alfred Lota<ag gave a theoretical q k t i m in an ecological key of
the development and evolution of open systems that depend on a
certain quantity of available energy. According .to his 'maximum power
principle,' the maximum use of available energy is possible for as lcmg
as resources are abundant and competition is low. When scarcity begins
to be felt, organimns that are efficient and ecmomical in implementing
parsimonious use of the energy they are able to capture will be favored.
The early phase of development is known as c a l o n i z a ~whereas
, the
9 phases in which energy use is minimized and of specialization are
Is known as the climax.
In the words of Federico Pulselli and coauthors,lo 'With regard to
4 current trends, human behavior and the struggle for economic growth
are processes of a system still in the colonization phase, whereas

Lotka, A.J., Contribution to the Energetics of Evolution. In Proceedings of the Natimd


Acuiiemy of Science, 8,pp. 147-151,1922
"JPulselJi,F.M.,Bastianmi, S., Mrchettini, N. & Tiezzi, E., The R d to Sus~nability:
GDP and Futuw Generatim. VVfi Press: Southamp- 2008.
City out of chaos

environmental emergencies are clear signals of the need for a climax


phase.'
Green architecture should be contributing to this. There are many
passible ways that should be cmefully assessed. A fine example is
the Tjibaou cultural center in Noumea, New Caledonia, designed
by Rauo Piano, in which modem technology simulates traditional
buildmg tmhnkpes and the form of the building is coherent with
-
wind dynamics and exploits wind energy a wonderful case of green
aesthetics. There is also the applied research of Ove Arup's team for
Beddington, Sutton, London, known as 'BedZED' or Beddington Zero
E w g y Deuelopment. Althou$ there is some contradiction of the
theory of JmmIthese cases, among the many designs proposed for
single buildings or whole neighborhoods, are certainly good examples
with a dimax perspective. They seem to opt for the lesser d: until
citie8 cease to grow, they at least minimbe impact.
The problem of Improving the efficiency of the system as a whole
remaim, as w o r n would suggest: reducing total consump& of
resources, bringing;the global footprint back within the limits of the
planet's bhpacity and inverting the growth trend. In the words of
Portoghesi:ll
The thema of bringing ardribxhire and nature back together again has
amqwmd space in the theowtbl and pmetkd spheres. D~zensof b&
have losked at the affnitiesand inlerfmce between the living d d
rmd that built by humm; many remt buildings have addressed the
problem of energy consumption, pollution and systematic wastefulness.
Hc%ummthe dawn of ' g a m t e c t u r e l is not yet here, I mean a type of
architecture impired by the desire and will to reduce fhe m p l c t
behueen thejkst pace 0f technologic~lsociety and the m d s offhe planet,
understood as a living self-regulatingorganism.
A little refleetion on this inexorable need brings to mind another
reference. This time it is not a new application but a technique from
the past.

11 Pastoghesi, P.,Editorial- Let's talk about the Earth. Ahitare la Tern, 180,#)(#.
Chaos and design

Raw earth

The photographs that George Steinmetz took of Shiban, Yemen, from


his ultralight aircraft are quite fascinating. SMban is the Manhattan
of the desert, a town with a population of almost five thousand that
grew in the middle of nowhere. The bricks that compose it are made
with the most abundant resources available to the population: earth
and sun. They obtained maximum benefit from a limited supply of
energy and matedab, exactly as Lotka taught. Shiban is one of many
towns in the world W t of raw earth,12
The strength of this Bechmque lies in the Wding process. The
~aterlalusediseartha<tra&dby-iniwJ;tisdwltha
high-enmpy content. The process of extraction and procesging tlses low
temperatures:only solar energy and the work of whoever mixes the earth
with some organic material and presses it into molds to produce bricks or
mmIithic walls. solid, durable, low-entropy s m . The circle closes
whenpartofa~&~lacedmabandOnedmddzeearthreRvnsto
its omgind form, restoring initial conditim. The materid can be mixed
again or rehvn naturally to the environment. At the end of the process,
the earth g;till has the same physicodlenical charasberistics without
residues or emissions. Moreover, the town is made of the same mat&al
as its enviro-t the link between the town and the rewuws uaed to
M d it is evident, a link that contemporary cities have f o ~ ~
M m achiOechve bears the grave r e s . e q of this crisis.
T m no longer belong to tZleir envirmerrt and view it as 'other.'
A h t step was probably the spread of cement which quickly became the
prime cor&ru& material by virtue d its strength, elasticity, ease of
w, and versatility for building foms and strudures. These properties
enabled many master works,such as those of Le Corbier and Auguste
Perret, pioneer of reinforced concrete (19023,but market requirements

--

12Pulselli, RM., Forlani, M.C., DiPaolo, E., Marchettini, N. & Tiezd, E., Living on earth
unbaked earth horzges and dtites. Abitare la Terra, 180, pp. 6-13,2007.
City out of chaos

reduced town plannvlg to legalized subdivision and architectme to mere


technique,fueling an explosion of ugly development.
The k n of the nmsters h t was not understood was that
continuity with tradition and laowledge of historical architecture was
never excluded. Le orhier's chapel of Notre Dame da Rochamp
is in reinforced concrete but is inspired by raw earth architectme. It
recalls the open forms of windmills in the Iranian region of Sistan. Le
CorWer used raw earth for the A4dsons M u W m in Algeria in 1962,
a housing project for refugees. In this case, the choice of msltwial was
inspired by two practical objectives: use of a well-hown traditional
technique and invo1vemient of the refugees in the building of their own
how. This reduced labor costs, provided training and occupation,
and was the h r m r of participative design, a controversial aspect of
currentswtahble building practices.
F r d Lloyd Wright's Pottery House in Santa Fe is also a raw earth
m ~ c t i o n a, fine &ern example of a poor, low-tech technique.
Wright alss designed other works in deserks, a climate with large
temperature differences between day and night? where raw earth is
the perfect solution for maintaining a constant intend temperature.
H e probably observed the Salish earth buildings in northerrr America
in his search for continuity with local building traditions.
Raw earth architecture was known to the masters of modern
architecture and was a eonstant reference, rich in formal and spbolic
value, enabling high performance through simplicity. However, the
architecture so common today is coarse and based on cullxirally
and aesthetically impoverished building materials and techmque.
Tmhn01ogy, especially so-called high tech, is alien to the concepts of
evolution and conservation, responding rather to a criterion of fast
change divorced from tradition.
On this subject, Nadia Marchettinil3 wrote that the problem of
contemporary architecture is a problem of lack of time and lack

13 M a r c h e w N.,Evolvere consen*&, ...lentamente. Oikos, 4, pp. 47-51,1998.


Chaos and design 143

of sxhwnta.tion and therefore a problem of total absence of culture.


She added:
h4ohrn technology no longer produces cr$smen and artisans who
wed art with icltow-how, The builder today no longer works with
mortar and stone related to the site, but with stanhrdized, ready-to-
use materials which are always nao and about which he knows
nothing. [...I Cement, the same throughout the world, conceived as
invincible to the elements and which does not age like stone, brick and
wood.Cement cannot be re-used; it crumbles, becoming s cumbemom
waste, &sonant in any setting, unifirm, a gvey wound among the
colours of nature, a melancholyframe.
Cement is quick and e a y to use and contributed to the rapid spread
of welfare, bud apart from the works of masters, it is also responsible
for the anonymity of present society, the lack of awareness of those
who build and design, disinterest in the search for harmony with
nature, standardization and homologation and hence ignarance of
diversity and beauty. Cement-based techniques, ccmfonning to the
one-dimmsiod concept of consumerism, have lost the wisdom and
complexity of nature. Their efficacy with respect to the social needs of
the second half of the 1900s is no longer so clear; indeed, the outskirts
of cities o b praduce alienation and crimislilliq. Faced with new
priorities, which today largely concern environmental questions, it is
necessary to find difhrmt so1utim-w that can combhe old and new
~ o restare~a dim& llnk with the d.
l and o

Aesthetics of complexity

By framing architecture in the dynamics of flows and stocks of


resources, we examined the implications of the physical structure
of buildings, the inorganic receptacle that has to provide comfort,
climate, and function under variable external conditions.
Let us now take the broader view indicated by the theme of this
book: the interactions of architecture with the living sphere, with
humans, society, and the environment. All these factors complete the
City out of chaos

meaning and function of architecture, contextualizingit and making f


dynamic and alive. Projects must consider interactions in tenm of
flows of energy, matter and information. These exchanges are just as
necessary for the maintenance of a building as they are for survival of
an organism.
Zaha Hadid's MAXXI and the projects of other contemporary
architects, such as Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskhd,
Enric M i r h , seen to share this theory, albeit intuitively, through
ephemeral f o m and urban metaphors. Whether they knowingly
gather the novelties of evolutionary sciences and complexity or
manifest inadequacy and disquietude towards these themes, placed in
the urban cantext the projects of these archiiecb simulate dissipative,
self-orgadzing structures d Prigogine, Mandelbrot frartals and
Lorenz strange attractors.
Let us consider the introverted, deconstnrcted form of the
Guggenheim mzzseum in Bilbao, designed by Frank Gehy (Fig. 37).
Much has been said for and against this building, but in our opinion it
is a significant case that offers much food for thought.

Figure 37: Guggenheim museum in Bilbao - Architect Frank Gehry (1997).

First of all, it represents the evolution of architecture in the second


half of last century, springing from the continuum of experiences
of the Guggenheim foundation. Comparison with the Guggenheim
Chaos and design 145

museum in Fifth Avenue, New York, designed by a master of modern


architecture, Frank Lloyd lV'ri#t,'iii-striking. Wrighfs project is a
masterpiece of harmony, an elegant composition with balanced
proportims. It is a modern interpretation of a classic design. Today's
Guggenheim (1997) and that of Manhattan (1943-59) are high
expressions of two periods half a century apart. What changed
between then and now? One of many answers could be the new
perception of the complexity of the world and the advent of scientific
theories on evolution and chaos.

Figure 38: The atrium of the Guggenheim museum in New York (1959) and
Bilbao (1997).

The Gu- museum in Bilbao is conceived as a collision of


volumes that generates unusual spaces, seemingly by chance, resulting
from deformation of concave and convex surfaces, interwoven and
suspended: a set of fragments that gravitate around a virtual orbit,
resembling a strange attractor.
City oart ofcltrtw

Figure 40: Strange attractor of Lorenz and the Virtual Guggenheim Museum
- Asymptote Studio (1999).
Chaos and design 147
Returning to Bilbao: like MAXXI, Gehry's museum, a sort of open
dissipahe organjsm, s eed ?i&GleB Efinteractim with the city and
the rest of the world, theoretical lines traced from different origins,
near and remote. Its titanium skin is like a shell that resists and adapts
under the action of mysterious forces, a c o m ~ t i o nof tensions and
compressim due to variations in pressure, speed, acceleration, and
capacity. The form of the Guggenheim is dictated not so much by statics
as by the laws of fluid dynamics. They am the flows of energy and
information that strike the project site, varying in intensity, brushing
the surfaces, and fonning them These flows, that materhh in Hadid's
project, are present here indirectly, as invisible forces that model the
form, as wind against a sail distends it, creating a convex surface. The
design follows the criteria that govern the dynamics of winds and sea
currents, and that trigge~self-organization in Mnard cells and tropical
storms (Chapter 03).
The forms of Gehry's architecture, and generally that of the
'deconstructiyists' who were so controversial in the 1990s, are
probably a mere exercise of style. They can probably be interpreted as
empty virtuosity or contrived scenography. Paolo Porro@esil4 defines
this architecture as a collection of 'oblique, captivating, ambiguous
m o n m m , architects' renunciation of all mponsibiIity except
towards thenzselves d their o m work, advertisements of a power
that no longer needs symbolic representations lxlt only exaltation of
its M t e d freedom of action.'
It is interesting to rise to the provocation and emmine the
possibility of finding a link between what Portoghesi calls 'singers
of obliquiw and the science of complex self-organizing system. We
do not know what the architects had in mind, but some considerations
are possible.
A first observation regards the way in which the G-
was designed, how the form was composed, the ideation process. The

14 P~oltoghesi,P.,Editorid - La tenera crescita. Abidare la Terra, l(l), 2ODl.


City out of chaos

procedure used by Geluy (and also Hadid) seems to have a strong


arbitrary component it follows a 'stochastic' process based on a
combination of choice and chance. The etymology of the Greek root refers
to archery where arrows fall in a random manner around the ~ l l i l ~ k ,
though the archer aimed the arrow: the system combines choice and
chance. In his composition, Gehry behaves like a good archer. He
assembles the elements of the projed but lets the form arise almost by
chance from the various arrangements,His habit of working with the
hands on scale models with different surfaces and materials, prior to
digital models, confinns his pioneering approach. Moreover, in certain
publications15 and architecture exhibitions, the buildings of Gehry and
other deconstructivists have been associated with images of accidental
collisions, collapses, fractures, and broken symmetries. They emphasized
an interesting aspect of deconstructivist architedure, apart from the
polemics it aroused. This manner of designing had the virtue of
abandoning rational mechanical schemes and looked for a connection
with the idea of complexity, self-organization, coevolution, albeit
intuitively, emphatically and provocatively. In Gehry'slbwords: 'If you
try to understand my buildings from the points of view of perspedive,
structural coherence, or formal definition, you will be disappointed.
I want open artifacts, not ended.' This concept is much closer to art than
architecture and recalls the concept of mtic opannessl7 and open evolving
systems of Prigogine?8 dissipative structures (Chapter01).
A second level of observation leads us to consider the relationship
of the project with its context, with the city and all possible
interactions on a global level. The choice of Bilbao was surprising, a
city in a period of decadence, gripped by financial and industrial
crisis. The idea of building a museum from nothing was to say the

Is Two are: Lotus 104. El* Milan, 2000; Abitm la Tern, l(1). Ganged: Rome,2OOl.
16 Geluy,F.,quoted m Lotus 104. E k t a Milan, 2000.
' 7 Jmgensen, S.E., Fath, B.D.,Bastianoni, S., Marques, J.C., Muller, F., Nielsen, S.N.,
Patten, B.C., Tiezzi, E. & Ulanowicz, R.E.,A N w Ecology. Systems Perspec*. Elsevier:
Amsterdam, 2007.
18 Tiezzi, E.,17re Essence of Time.WIT Press: Southampton, 2003.
Chaos and design

least unwal, but not necessarily wrong. It would now be difficult to


deny the repercussions of .the museum in time and space.
The museum is a landmark, a node where the mesh of the network
of city relationships, which was flat and without urban hierarchy,
becomes denser. The museum revitalized a seriea of activities, giving
meaning to a neighborhood that had lost its industrial function The
eccentric nature of the project originally aimed to break what could
be called the city's condition of themnod-c equilibrium: stable,
imtnobile, non-productive, maximum entropy. The project was a local
perturbation, a small variation that & w b d the organization of the
whole urban system and its economic and social condition. It was
intended to trigger self-organizationand morphogenesis of a complex
system pushed beyond an instability threshold.
In practical terms, this new architectural work had various
consequences. In the immediate urban context, it requalified an
abandoned area, giving it back to the city; it made its presence known
by means of a tower with no apparent function except to draw
attention to the site of the museum; it included the riverside in the
composition by r d d o n in the water; it embraced the bridge across
the river, an ugly intrusive structure, including it in the body of the
work and transforming it into a structural axis of the composition.
Luigi Restinem Pugbi'sl9 comment was: The bridge acquires the
appeal of a colored pop insert and the museum, which was otherwise
situated on only one bank, conquers both, acquiring an unusual
dimension.'
In general, the image of the museum provided a pretext for
renewing certain urban functions and services, opening the way to
new sectors of activity. At the Same time, it hooked into new networks
of relations 4prmeses beyond the urban scale, mtil the global
dinnension. Not only has it attracted artists and visitors fron dl over
the world, but it has promoted an event and activated relations and
City act of chaos

communications with the world of the media, culture, information,


and the market. In this way, the city discovered or invented new
resources and established new synergies, acquiring a new position in
the global village; finally, it found a new road, among the many
possible, for future development.
The relationship of the museum with the city can also be observed
in the aesthetic dimension. The architecture of the Guggenheim was
conceived as a fradal unit of the city. The network of infrastnrdures
and system of circulation in the architectural organism is an articulated
system that flows in the interstitial spaces or spaces in between, as if they
were the voids, alleyways, squares and avenues of a modern city. In the
words of Franco Purinku)
Architectural language has appropriated the dimension of the city in
its fullest extends, turning itself in a totally urban language I...]
Layact, fabric, space, place, setting and context have been adopted by
the building as its genetic memoy, a hidden substructure that
invisibly nourishes composition.
The theme of form suggests another reflection. The building is a unique
sculpture composed of thousands of components, each different from
the other. A destabilizing operation in a building world dominated by
simple techniques, mass production, standardization, and repetition.
Digital technology was a turning point that enabled unique forms to be
built and controlled during construction. Joseph Giovanninin observed:
Computers made clouds, waves and mountains understandable and
chaos science possible; and it's the same tool that made Gehy'sformal
turbuhce practicable. The building perfectly exemplifis the passage
from mechanics to electronics of our post-industrial age.
The search for uniqueness rather than reproduction is an attitude that
contradicts the rationality of contemporary mechandd building and
even certain recent neoredudionist scientific developments that tmd to
simplify nature as the sum of parts and repetition of a few slices of

20Purini, F., Nwita attese da qualche tempo. Lotus 104, pp. 60-67,2000.
n Giovannini, J., Gehry's reign in Spain. Architecture, 86(l2),pp. 64-77,1997.
Chaos and design 151

DNA, ignoring the role of biodiversity and hence part of the epipetic
histroxy of biological evolution.,
We have disntssed c& aspects of the museum in Bilbao,
especially the theory behind the language of Gehry. These aspects make
the Gu&genheim an interesting urban case and a pretext for finding
other signs of complexity and self-organization in urban systems. We
are of course aware how exceptional deconstrudivist architectme is,
and that it only has sense as unique and isolated cases. Application
of these composition techniques is a parenthesis in the history of
construction that certainly does not meet total agreement. Here we will
not discuss architecturalvalidity but only make a comment on aesthetic
value, on the genesis of form, endeavoring to recognize a value that is
more artistic than technical, and somehow inspired by the laws of
chaos. It seems the same art that Paul Klee taught at the Bauhaus in
Weinar, when he was seeking a parallel between the genesis of nature
and that of a work of art.
In any case, we agree with Portoghesi'sz reflections on the
implications of the various disciplines of chaos theory (Lorenz's
'butterfly effect'):
As a symbol of a new way of seeing and thinking, it certainly gave the
death blow to one of the most stubborn myths of the century, that of
the machine model of all physical phenomena and all rational
behaviour, a myth to which even artistic creation was submitted [...I
l*he consequences of the unexpected familiarity that science acquired
with complex and chaotic phenomena can be seen almost everywhere
in the most diverse disciplines and the delay with which they began to
manifist in architecture is a symptom of the isolation produced by the
excessive cult of autonomy that architects continue to practise.
By seeking a theory of form of these architect artistsI we have
endeavored to find support for our systemic view of the complex, self-
organizing city. We thought we glimpsed the hazy outlineI or in some
cases clear signsl of chaos, complexity, dissipative structures, far-from-
City out of chaos

equilibrium systems, albeit in a di&rent light. The fact remaim that the
theory of complex systems is an essential transition for devdopmg a
new sensibility for themes canc-g the city and its evolutionary
nature and for perceiving its aesthetic value. We are convinced that 'to
avoid losing beauty, [...] architecture and town planning should bear in
mind the complexity of relations and evolutionary thne as basic values
of building aesth&ics.'P

23 Tiemi, E.,Beauty and Science. WIT Press: Southampton, 2005.


Epilogue

A prosperous view
Those who arriue at %kla can see little of the city, beyond the plank
jbces, the sackcloth screens, the scafildings, the metid armatures, the
wooden catwalks hanging from ropes or supported by sawhorses, the
la&rs, the trestles. I ask you, W y is Tkkla's construction taking
such a long time?" inhabitants continue hoisting sacks, Z m ' n g
leaded strings, moving long brushes up and dourn, as they answer:
'So that its destnrction cannat begin'. A d if asked whether they fear
that, once the scafildings are r e m e d , the city may begin to mumble
and fall to pieces, they add hastily, in a whisper, 'Not only the city'.
Thd& is a a@paised between c m W o n and destruction. The
downhill side is the road taken by energy. Altbugh energy! remains
congfant (&st law of therm.odynamics), it fbws into cold sinks from
which it can never reemage (second law of thennod-). This is
an bev;ersible road, a cam+ry diredion, the r m why entropy
inmmeaFwhy Tlwkla aumblas d why we all grow old. This direction
takesall systems tavards thermodynanic equilibrium or chaos.
The upward direction leads to where order pmails over chaos; it is
the road against entropic degradation taken by the kmg systems of our
universe.These systems let energy flow thraugh&em and the work it d w
generates surprising,beautiful, - r
o stnrcaues in a great variety of
fonrrs. Thus photosynthesis captuna energy from the sun and closea the
fir& link of the chain of life; thus all creahues prosper: communities of
organism in natural eamptmm, lnunan civilization and its cities.
City out of chaos

Thekla and its inhabitants are a unit. They constitute an organism,


an (eco)system in which the fates of individuals are linked. The people
of Thekla know that what is good for Thekla is good for them, so they
hold it in high esteem. Thus Thekla is ordered, dynamic, alive and the
whole community has a stake in maintaining this state in time. This is
why Thekla is a building site on which everyone works. By absorbing
the energy of its inhabitants, Thekla's steady state of minimum entropy
persists in time. The population knows it has a common aim. Thekla
provides a life for its people if they work, collaborate and share the aim
of keeping Thekla alive indefinitely.
Thekla could be many cities. We do not know whether it is a certain
city, all cities, or the whole planet, but the scale does not matter. What
matters is that Thekla is a system in which all processes and elements
are part of a network. This is what the theories of wolutionary physics,
complexity, and chaos tell us about cities. Since the stability of Thekla is a
dynamic state maintained by all its elements, little is needed to perturb its
order and cross the instability threshold into the q i u n of collapse. Since
the population of Thekla knows this, we like to think they act prudently,
measuring, detecting, and calculating so as never to exceed the canying
capacities of city structures. In o w personal view of Thekla, the population
is on the spot where signs of decay are found; they consult each other, they
organize repair of cracks, consolidation of strudures and replacement of
old parts. They know it is wise not to exceed carrying capacity.
We admit that Thekla captured our imaghtion more than the other
invisible cities and we found ourselves imagining stories that might
happen there. We would like to add the fonowing story, with apologies
to Calvino.
Once upon a time in Thekla, a small elite decided to build the taUest,
richest, and most beautiful houses for themselves.They built their houses
on the roofs of other houses. Their pursuit of power enabled them to
hoard wealth and build higher and higher towers. In the process, they
absorbed as many of Thekla's commcms as they could. When the
opulence of their houses began to weigh on the houses below, they built
pillars that rested on other housesIbut soon the load became so great that
the houses of the people could no longer support the weight The people
of TheMa had been expert builders for generations and warned the
minority not to exceed the carrying capacity. Their voices ere not heard
because of budding noise and the general preocmpation with shoring
up houses. Those of the elite who heard this warning rqlied that
the people's calculations were too rough to make a case for stopping
conshction. The &te were skilled in diplomacyI as shown by the fact
that they had succeeded In building on others' roofs. They saw no reason
I to change course and coined an attractiveslogan "busina as d.'
Couldthe~o4thethefewexc~ed~gcapacity?Wdd
it be possible t~ k,when? n l t would happen if the lmmes
underneath began to give way? If they crumbled one aftm the otherfwhat
wddb~ento~houaesofthe~?CouId~housesmtop
i conceivably meet the same fate as the hauses supportingthem?
Luckily for Thekla, this is only an invented story. Calvinds tale
suggests that the population of ThekIa is wise, aware, and sane. What
about us?
Complexity theory shows in different ways that we are all part
of a system and that we share a common for which we are all
responsible: the planet Earlh. That conmon includes the functions of
eccwystemsI the biosphere, biodiversity, and culture. Recent scientific
research indicates that the conservation of this common is threatened.
The greenhouse effect, climate changef extinctions of natural speciesf
and loss of biodiversity are consequences of human activity' of the
consmption of natural resources and the production of emissions
beyond a certain threshold. In the real world, humam have taken a course
that feedsfhe ambitions and maxinizes the profit of the&. This course
c m o t take us far.
It is true that other research denies the existence of any problem
and criticizes the data and calcdations of geenhwse proponentsI
claiming that climate change is a natural fluctuation and not man-
made. This position is now less accredited.
City out of chaos

From an operational viewpoint, the scientific debate between these


two camps is not in itself negative. It is an exhortation to be more
nnetidous and to go more deeply into the question. However, the
presence of two opposing scientific theories on the real or presumed
envir~nm~ntal crisis poses a much more important question.
Recent documentation of the state of the environment and the way it
is evolving makes it necessafy to choose one of two roads, or rather,
oneoftwo~~~ofthefuture.Onecampisfor~asususP1,the
other for changmg the rules, for pursuhg the aims of envirorunental
,sllsMm- and socialeqLdlty with greater determination. Many of us
may not fed sufficiently informed to choose between these two options,
however we believe that we should be asking ourselves some ques-.
For example: which of the two propods would be more &ly to
offex work or stitnulab creativity? Which offers glimpses of a coherent
development plan that could ensure opportunities far ow children and
pdchildrenandafuhuefarh~onthisplanet?Whasbetter
margins of development, promotes a common ideal, offers oppoThuritles
to many, opens the doors to ~hnologicaland cultural creativity and
innovation?Which of the two is a prosperaus view?
Thekla is an ima- city. What is the history of our cities? What
is their future? If someone asked us what plan we were following,
how m y could answer? It is well to question ow's personal view.
Accorcbg to Calvino, the population of Thekla has been doing this
for generations,
If; dissatisfid dth the answm, somom p pui his eye to a crack in a@ae,
s
he sees mmes pulling up other mums, scnffsldinp that embrae o h
slafildings, b m that prop up other beams. 'What meaning does your
m k u c t i o n b? he'asks. W t is the aim ofa city under amstruccion
unless it is a city? IMmz is the p h yar arepUowing, the blueprint?'
W e will s k u it to you as soon as the working day is m:we
cannot interrtrpt our work MOW', they n m r .
Work skaps at sunset. DarkraessfaUs over the building site. %I sky
is filled with stars. There is the blueprint', Uzey say.
Acknowledgments

We express our gratitude to all the members of the Ecodynamics


group of Siena and to Mrs. Helen Ampt far her precious work and
kindness.
Names index

Alberti, Marina, 102,13n Clausius, Rudolph Julius Emanuel, 10,ll


Alexander the Great, i Copernim Nicolaus, 8
Aoki, Ichiro, 13,911 Crichton, Michael, 44,45,9n
Aristotle, 51
Daly, Herman E., 4 % 247%8n, 67,69,78
Bagliani, Marco, 86,14n Davies, Paul,38,4n,49,2n
Bastianoni w w,2% 80, &1,119, In, Deinwates, i
13,ln,134,2n, 135,3n,139,10n,148,17n Delavigne, Raymond H., 83, l l n
Batemn, Gregory, 136,411 DiPaolo, Enrico, 141,1211
Batty, Michael, 97, k,98,4n
Belgrano, Andrea, 101,lOn Einstein,Albert, 130
Belowov, Boris, Pavlovich, 31 Ekmnan, Peter, 144
BQlard, Hemi, 34,35,41 Emanuel, Kerry A, 43,6n,7n
Bertakmffy, Ludwig von, 125,511 Escher, Maurits Cornelius, 12l
Binswanger, Mathias, 22,3n Farina,Almo,101, 1On
Bocchi, Gianluca, 23, fm Farinelli, Franco, 51,4n,118,22n
Boccioni, Umberto, iv Parley, JcshaJ 4, %
Boeri-,%,* Fath, Brian D., 148,17n
Botero, Gbanni, 51 Forlani, Mada Cristina, 141, 1%
Bradley, Gordan, 102,13n Fourier, JeanBaprisbeJ q h ,10,ll
Brown, Mark T., 70,10n,80,7n Frerdunm, Dermis, 105,15n
Bush, Gedl:ge,W.,42
We& C;saliteo, 8,26
Calvino, IMo, 5, In,32 Galli, Alessandro, 86,14n,135,3n
Capra, Fritjof, 4,17,16n, 39,5n, 46,48, In, Gardner, Robert H., 100,911
49,50,52 Gehry, Frank O., iii, 144, 146, 147, 148,
h o t , Sadi-Nicholas, 6 1611,151
Cartesw, (Rend Descartes), 9,51 Geargescu-Roe- Nicholas, 22,411
Cassigoli, Renzo, 128,7n Giovannhi, Joseph, 150,2111
Celdesi Valeri, Clelia, 116,20n,117,2111 G(Mel Kurt, 125
Ceruti M a w , 2 3 , h Gore, A1 (Albert Arnold),42
Cheeps, 76,77,79 Guedj, Denis, 76, In
C h i , Marcello, 51,3n,128,8n
Name index
Hadid, Zaha,iii, 129,130,144,147,148 Natali, Vincenzo, 122,211
Haub, Carl, 5&3n Naveh, Zev, lOl,lln, 1Zn
Hendricks, Jochem,v, 95, %, In, 98,115 Newcornen, Thomas, 82
Heraditus of Ephesus, 6,12 Newton, Isaac, 8
Nicolis, GrrZgoire, 13, 11x1, 33, In, 36, 38,
3n, 4n,49,211
Jan&&, Erich,100,Bn Niccolucci, Valentina, 86,14n,135,3n
Jevons, William Stanley, 82,138,8n, 140 NieIsen, !&wen Nors, 148
Jsrgensen, Sven Erik,80,7n,148,17n Obrist, Hans Ulrich, 98,3n
Kandinsky, Wassily, iv Odum, Eugene P., 99,611
Khun,Thomas Samuel, 9 Odum, Howard T., 63,711, 8n, 68, 70,7l,
Klee, Paul, iv, 151 11%76,78,79,4n, 5% 80,6n, 7% 81,9n
KloecU ~~ 116,20n, 117,21n O'Neill, Robert V., 100,911
Ove Arup, 140
Koolhaas, Rem, 98.3n
Krier, Leon, 5 2 3n Pmdolfi, Piera, 13,1011
Kwin-, Sanford, 98,3n Pascal, Blaise, 9,51,125
La Pontaine, Jean De,ii Patten, Bemard C, 148,17n
Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard P-8-Esquivel, Ado&, 26, lOn, 11% 27
Jeanneret-Gris),130,131,135,141,142 Perre&Auguste, 141
Libeskhd, Daniel, 144 h, Renzo, 128,140
Lorenz,Edward, 45,10n,144,146,151 Pillet, Gonzague, 7&3n
Loremetti, Ambrogio, 75,&5,86 Poletti, Antonio, 13,1011
Lotka,Alfred, 137,911,141 Pirovano, Fabrizio, 122,3n
Ludovisi, Alessandro, 13,lOn Plutarch, 76
Porbghesi, Paolo, vi, 136,5n,6% 140, lln,
Magnani, Agnese, 116,19n 147,14n,151,22n
Mandebrot, Bienot B., 144 Prestinenza Puglisi, Luigi 149,1911
Marchettini, Nadia, 77,2n,80,8n, 86,1411, Prigogine, nya, i1,2 In, 4 7,2n, 8,3n,9,
90,16n,116,19n, 119, In, 139, loh, 141, 4n,6n, 10,11,12 an, 13,1ln, 141- 15,
12n, 14213n 13%n,~ I I
Marques, Jo&oCar10~,148,17n Pulselli, Federico Maria, 77, 2n, 82, %7,
Marsh, George PerWns, %,7n 15%119, In, 133, In, 139,1011
Marzluff, John M., 102,13n Pulselli, Riccardo Maria, v, 26, lln. 87,
Mascarucci, Roberto, 53, 6n, 54,84,12n, 15n,90,16n, 105,15n, 107,16n, 113,18n,
85,90,93,17n 119, In, 133, In, 134, 2n, 135, 3% 141,
Mithelucd, Ghatmi, 136 1%
Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, iv Purln,Franco, 150,2011
Miralles, Enric (Enric Mirdes Moya), 144 Ratti, Carlo, 105,15n,113, I&, 116, 2011,
Moebius, August Ferdinand, 146 117, n n
M o a Marc Haydel, 42 Rees, William E., i, 27,12n, 78
Morin, Edgar, 23,6n,24,83 Revell, Giles, 57,59
Morowitz, Harold J., 60,5n,62 6n Ridolfi, Roberto, 134,2n
Mtlller, Falix, 148,17n Ristori, Sandra, 116,1911
Murota, Takeshi, 78,3n Roger n, 19,29
Name index
Rajas, Frandsca M., 116,20n,117,nn Terragni, Giuseppe, iv
Romano, Pietro, 107,16n,113,181-1 Thales of Miletus, 76,77,79
R o d , Uaudio, 63,an,116,19n Theroux Paul Edward, 117
Rosrd, Federim, 26,1ln,116,19II Thame~n,W h (LordKelvin), 10
Rub& &no, 122 Tiezzi, h o , v, 4, 8, 3% 12, 7n, 17,1511,
Rustid, M m o , 87,15n,9011611,116,1911 19,In, 25,9n,63,8% 77,2n,80,8% 113,
Ryan, Clare, 10Z13n 18n
Trenberth, Kevin, 43,811,44
s c r n d Enzo,
~ 99,k Turner, Monica G.,100,911
S d m h a d M., m,3n
Shakespeme,W i b m , 4 Ulanowicz, Robert E.,99,7n,148,17n
m g . e r , l h v h 16,14n,17,22 5n
Shulenber$er,&+c#10'2,1311 Van Gogh, Vincent, iv
Simondlul,Eugaio, 133,'In,134,2n Vitruvius, Marcus Pollio, i
S m i 4 Adotm, 126 Wwkemagel, Mathis, ii, 27,13n,28,78
%all& Olivries, 116,1% Watt, James, 82
George, 141 willey, Matt, 57, FIB
-, h w ,2,1& 7 , b 9,611,10, W ~ ~ 1 0 5
11,1$12n,%4,bL4%5!5 Wright Frank Laydl 142,145
Tatkxhi Maria L13,llbu
Taut, Tjruno, iv Zhabotinsky, Anatol M., 31
Taz&Na* 98,3n Zumbrunnen, Craig 102
I The theories of chaos and mmpkxjty M(lus O un- these sptWlB: & nMI
and man-made Drocesses on our danet have a wmmotl KhWx and ttre intetconnectsd.
Evdubonary ph;s~cs 1s the study of the emergence of rl~vdly from the complex fatxw:
~ ~whtch we are mt It explains the formahon of l ~ m st~cturag
of r e W 0 n s h i of g and
their evoluti& in a dynamic work ~ i s s i ~ &structures, steady state systems, self-

I
ii
organization, fluctuations and feedback are some of the concepts considered by the authors
in their treatment of complex system$ such as dimate, society, economies and cities.
This book is speafically concerned w~thc~tiesThe aim of the authors 1s to promote a
new operatwe approach to the study of urban systems through an integrated, systemic
vlew of their components and relations with the outside Evolutronary science opens new
development prospects for citles in the framework of susta~na~hty.
Readers will find discuss~onson monltonng techniques, environment
susta~nabil~tyindlcatws, ways of representing cities through systems
measurement of flows and stocks, mob~legeographies and dynamlc mapping
The authors, an architect and a physlcal chemlst, draw examples fmm literature,
contemporary art, osullat~?gchemlcal react~ons,architecture, inviable cites, imaginary
characters, snow flakes an'd humc s The book represents a meetmg of science,
technology, arts and philosopP- .- a ie hoped wtll produce something new

Seti8s: The Sustainable W o M


Trtles of related mteresl:

Handbook of Ecological Modelling ' , ,.


and Informatics -%
9 _C
Editom S E MRGENSEN, The Unwerslty of
PharmaceubmlSaence. Denmark.
T-S CHON, Pusen National UnlvemIty, Korea
F A RECKNAGEL, University of Adelah, Australla
ISBN. 978-1-84564-207-5 2009 WX4 5 4 ~ + CD
elSBN 978-180584-3423
The Road to Sustainability

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