The Urban System
By Andrea Korb and Matthew McEnerney
If you’ve stayed with us through the first two articles, you might be thinking, “wow, these theories, stats, and policies are interesting, but what’s your point?”
If you’re saying that, you sound like Andrea after Matt is done speaking.
Unfortunately, though, in urban policy there are often no simple answers. So hold on to your f@&ing hats. As policy professionals, we learn to see human interaction with the urban environment as data points, and while big data has been integral to progress, cities are complex systems with natural and unnatural players, and green and grey infrastructure. When Matt is teaching environmental policy or public administration, he sometimes asks his students to rattle off words they associate with “nature,” and very rarely does anyone suggest “people.” After the dawn of the Information Age, we began to think of humans as complex computers, but in many ways urban communities function more like natural ecosystems than computational programs. That’s why we need more systems thinking.
SIDE NOTE: In The Extended Mind, Annie Murphy Paul writes about how damaging the human-as-computer analogy has been. For example, our minds and bodies need breaks and movement and outdoor walks to perform our best work, but instead, we prop ourselves at a desk for as long as possible and try our damnedest to function like the machines before us. Paul’s work is further support for the arguments in our first article.
Systems thinking, at its most simple and tangible, is a way to think about problems or subjects as a collection of interlinking parts that form a complex entity — like, I don’t know, a city. A system consists of three things: elements, interconnection, and a function or purpose. Gabriel Ramos, who is now in leadership at UNESCO, wrote that the systems approach:
“promotes cross-sectoral, multidisciplinary collaboration in the process of policy formulation by taking proper account of the crucial linkages between issues generally treated separately within different specializations and scientific and institutional ‘silos’. The approach provides a methodology to achieve a better understanding of the non-linear behaviour of complex systems and improve the assessment of the consequences of policy interventions.”
Ecologist Luis Bettencourt, who teaches urban innovation at the University of Chicago, recently wrote a book analyzing cities as complicated systems. He describes cities as a “web of interdependencies” and pulls together an eye-watering number of disciplines and fields to interpret how cities work. Even a natural ecosystem, he says, is insufficient as an analogy to a city; rather, a city is a “metasystem” of many connected systems. YIKES.
The complex nature of cities means that policymakers and leaders must be highly sensitive to connectivity and consequences. But anyone who has worked in government knows that we operate each agency and issue area as distinct, isolated units, and we rarely coordinate effectively across departments or with the community.
An operations professional named Ian Wolfe, who has a background in the Army Airborne Special Forces, created the graphic below while he was a graduate student at Harvard. It is a breakdown of a sustainable city using systems thinking. It shows the urban systems’ interconnected mechanisms, issues, and feedback loops. Kinda makes your head hurt doesn’t it? Issues aren’t one-dimensional; each policy creates tangents and causes externalities. Politicians, public officials, and business leaders often subscribe to monocausotaxophilia: the idea that there is a single solution to everything. That is, as James Gleick describes in his book Chaos, a nice, linear idea — and people like those. But cities are nonlinear, and their dynamics are…dynamic. This creates a rich kind of behavior that never happens in linear models.
This interconnectivity means that the points of view of the people or entities in power and with the strongest voices shape all aspects of urban life. The voices and power represented in several of these bubbles (let’s consider citizens, city planning department, past urban policy, elitism, and auto-centered design) has made some cities increasingly expensive, with corporate professionals moving in and creative, working, and lower classes moving out.
Why are certain blue cities becoming too expensive and increasingly inequitable, despite the values they espouse? In a recent podcast episode, Ezra Klein considers the possibility that zoning regulations, environmental review, and community involvement sound like good ideas, but they stifle development because they slow processes, increase costs, and give blocking power to NIMBYs — and not enough affordable housing gets built. In San Francisco and Los Angeles, NIMBYs fight to stop the feared “Manhattanization” of their neighborhoods even as they decry the spike in homelessness caused by a statewide housing crisis. Their Manhattan counterparts do the same, fearing the loss of their sliver of city views and increased congestion that will make it more difficult to travel by automobile. Even in Brooklyn, the latte liberal capital of the world, wealthy transplants used their political power to prevent a community improvement project in the guise of environmental review.
Like any ecosystem, if a city becomes dependent on a homogeneous class, it is vulnerable to trends and behaviors of that specific demographic (like following Andrew Yang to a country home). Cities like Austin, Nashville, and Pittsburgh provide something more dynamic: affordability and individualized opportunity, which yields youth, passion, culture, food, ideas.
But there is also opportunity in interconnectivity: improvements in one arena can have surprising, positive impacts on another. Last year, Cornell University conducted a study showing that “well-designed and maintained urban parks can reduce gun violence, improve safety and keep residents healthier, while poorly-designed and maintained parks lead to more crime.” Researchers looked at 45 peer-reviewed articles on the subject and found that social interaction and recreation, community perception, biophilic stress reduction, climate modulation, and spaces that clearly delineate societal functionality can reduce crime, and specifically violent crime.
Systems thinking requires effective coordination across issue areas and with the whole community — not just the loudest people with the most time and resources. And this is where the pandemic has brought a silver lining: when community and council meetings retreated to the safety of the virtual world, citizen engagement went up. People with fewer resources and time to travel to and sit in public hearings — like those who work multiple jobs or night shifts, parents with young children, students, and individuals with limited access to transportation — have been adding their voices to the NIMBYs’.
To reiterate Nerdopolis themes, the pandemic has highlighted several blind and outdated spots of city policy and character, and has revealed the interlocking gears of the system. Reforms that develop better coordination and equitable communication across system actors — and recognize the complex interdependence between them — won’t solve all of our issues, but will provide a framework for a more sustainable and inclusive urban future.
*Completion of this particular blog is considered a sleep aid by most primary care physicians.
**We apologize for our meandering stream of consciousness; this was a thought exercise in why everything in cities is so magical and so frustrating.
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Author Bios:
Andrea B. Korb is the Economic Development Manager for Downtown Santa Monica, Inc. She works on policies and programs to bolster the local economy, analyzes and tracks real estate development, and supports recruitment and retention of business in the district. Andrea previously worked as a Senior Advisor in the Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity in New York City. She also held roles at the NYC Department of Consumer Affairs’ Office of Financial Empowerment (where she got trapped in an elevator) and at the Washington D.C. Mayor’s Office of Policy and Legislative Affairs. She has a law degree from Georgetown University Law Center and an undergraduate degree in Urban Studies and English Literature from Brown University.
Matthew McEnerney is a Senior Analyst for Stormwater Management for the City of New York. In this role, he is involved in mapping and inspecting stormwater systems, auditing public land, and recommending green infrastructure. He also serves as an adjunct professor of environmental policy at St. John’s University. Prior to this, Matthew held various roles focusing on issues pertaining to housing, infrastructure, and environmental protection in NYC government and as a private consultant. He had the privilege of being mentored by urbanist and political scientist Dr. Benjamin Barber. Matthew completed his undergraduate and graduate studies in Philosophy and International Relations at St. John’s University and holds a master of science degree in Sustainability Management from The Earth Institute at Columbia University.
Andrea and Matthew first crossed paths in a workplace that is the purgatory of New York City government, but that is a story for a different day. The views displayed in this article are their own and are not reflective of any organization or institution.
They are both fully vaccinated.
