From City to Civium

In my long contemplation of that thing sometimes called “civilization,” one insight has come through that seems significant enough to write down and share. It concerns what I suspect might be the core driver behind all variations on “the city” and, by extension, civilization itself.

Below, I will endeavor to compactly convey the central idea and then make the argument that we are now (for the first time in history) at a moment where that core driver is beginning to break down. The implication is that we are at a pivot point in history.

Note: I’ve previously shared much of this in videos. My friend Nick Redmark created a nice compilation (with pictures using MidJourney for extra irony) for those who prefer that medium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9oeVtWFOXU

Now, a bit of background.

Scaling Laws

In his book “Scale” theoretical physicist Geoffrey West tells of an investigation into the underlying principles that govern the growth and life spans of everything from plants and animals to companies and cities.

The researchers discovered a remarkably consistent dynamic: a relationship called “sublinear scaling”. For example, if you increase the mass of a mouse you don’t increase its energetic needs at the same rate. Instead, if you increase the mass by a factor of 10 (from 1 to 10 for example) you increase the metabolic rate by only about 5.6. Keep doing this and you can end up with an animal with the mass of an elephant (10 million grams), but with a metabolic rate of only 177,000. The ratio of mass to metabolic rate went from 1:1 to 56:1.

The folks working on this project looked at all kinds of systems and they kept noticing this sublinear scaling. They noticed it in cells; in different kinds of animals; in plants; in forests and ecosystems. It was ubiquitous and played a major role in how life operates and grows.

Then they looked at cities.

At first, cities showed the same kind of dynamic. Double the population of the city and you increase infrastructure like roads and electrical lines by around 85%. That same old sublinear scaling. But then a new kind of scaling relationship showed up.

When they looked at things like innovation, productivity and wages, they noticed a completely different kind of scaling relationship: superlinear scaling. In the case of these characteristics, if you double the population of a city, you increase the productivity of the city by more than double (roughly 115%). Double the population, increase the productivity by 115%. Double the population, increase innovation by 115%.

Cities and superlinear scaling

Here is my first proposition: superlinear scaling is the generator of cities. The city is, in its essence, the solution to the problem of how to grow the population of a place as large as possible so as to maximally benefit from superlinear scaling.

Consider: if you double the population of a city, you increase several important characteristics like wealth and innovation superlinearly. Move from a village of 10,000 to a town of 20,000 and per capita wages increases by 15%, sort of “automagically”. Double it again and those wages increase by 15% again. After a few doublings, the wealth and innovation gap between the “tiny village” and the “big city” is quite large.

Notably, West and team looked at cities across many periods of time, a wide variety of cultures and across many different levels of population. More or less, none of the particulars mattered that much. The dynamic was there in India, Japan, England and the United States and in cities from the 800’s through to the current age. The key was simply the relationship between population and superlinear scaling.

Notice the implicit feedback loop. Wealth and innovation are profound attractors. Merely by moving from the village to the city, you can participate in this increase and the various qualities of life that stem from increased wealth and innovation (including things like fancy architecture, fashionable restaurants and the like). All things being even vaguely equal, many people will choose to move to the city. This increases the population — which then increases the wealth and innovation.

Left to its own devices, this attractor would pull everyone into the city. However, the increase in population isn’t unconstrained. If you want to add more people into a city, you have to find some way to provide food, water and housing, to remove waste, to enable people to move around, etc. If you can’t solve for these constraints, you can’t increase the population of the city.

How do you solve for these constraints? You take advantage of the wealth and innovation produced by superlinear scaling, of course! Having a hard time feeding people? Invent irrigated agriculture. Have a hard time housing people? Invent the elevator and deploy wealth to construct skyscrapers to radically increase the vertical potential of housing.

Thus we have a dynamic tension. Increasing population produces superlinear wealth and innovation. It also produces a variety of new pressures. To the degree that the people of the city can craft and implement solutions to those pressures, the city can continue to grow and produce superlinear results. To the degree that they can’t, stagnation and even collapse.

Cities as the essence of civilization

I propose that this dynamic tension at the center of cities is also at the center of civilization.

Consider one of the core innovations discovered early in the history of urbanization: the conversion of complex nature into functional territory. Near the center of the city, the function of land is as a place for business and population density. Fields and forests and streams (complex ecology) are cleared to make room for these specific functions. Near the periphery, the function shifts to lower density residential and perhaps industry. Farther from the center you enter the territory of food production and waste disposal.

The logos of civilization is simply the expansion of the idea of “functional territory” over a large space. “All roads lead to Rome.” In a crucial sense, every aspect of a civilization is, ultimately, a piece of the technical solution of increasing the population of the Capital. Secondary and tertiary cities and the “outlying territories” are simply part of the extended body of The City. Agricultural, industrial and even cultural centers producing material for the Capital.

Of course, this account makes it seem like the citizens of Alexandria (or Chicago or Birmingham) are somehow subordinate to or less than the citizens of Rome (or New York or London). While the inhabitants of the Capital might very well agree with that assessment, I think it is not quite that simple. But this takes us deeper into the inquiry.

Ephemeralization

My second thesis is that the superlinear scaling observed by West is very closely related to the similarly shaped scaling observed by Metcalfe (e.g., Metcalfe’s law or the “network effect”). Per Metcalfe’s law, adding n nodes to a network increases the ‘influence and value’ of the network by something like n^2. In other words, it is superlinear.

Economists and folks in the tech industry have studied this phenomenon thoroughly over the past few decades. We notice that in a wide variety of domains, once a network gets to a “critical mass” of users, it indeed begins to experience a positive feedback loop where more users makes the network more attractive which brings more users. Interestingly, while the value of the network (as measured in revenue, market cap and attractiveness/growth rate) increases, we don’t see superlinear scaling in innovation. The obvious explanation is that cities are built by the people in the cities — while networks often are built by a (sublinear) corporation. The implication, of course, is that an open source network that gets to critical mass should be able to outcompete closed rivals. Perhaps a topic for another day.

My argument here is that what we are observing in the superlinear scaling of cities is a consequence, not of cities themselves, but of the nature of information and communication networks. At the most fundamental level, in order to get superlinear scaling, we don’t need people to “live” next to each-other, we need them to communicate with (and collaborate with) each-other.

Of course, for the majority of human history, “collaborating with” and “living near” amounted to the same thing. But here we notice that while a tremendous part of the work of civilization has been to reshape physical reality so as to facilitate getting as many human bodies as possible into proximity, there has always been another solution: ephemeralize communication. Rather than solving the problem of collaboration by bringing bodies into proximity, innovate new ways to afford communication that are not bound to physical proximity.

If we are looking at population through the lens of networking, the question of “who is in the same city” ultimately amounts to the question of “who can potentially come into communication”? Physically, this might be afforded by my walking from my home across the street to your home. Or by riding a bike down the road to the local coffee shop. Or by taking a bus across town. Or a train between towns. Or a plane across the country.

Transportation affords a solution to increasing population along the direction of ephemeralization. The “population of a city” is some rough accounting of the total number of people with whom any given person can come into communication. It therefore includes, to a greater or lesser degree, everyone who can physically travel into face to face encounter.

Roads and triremes enabled “all of Rome” to be in some degree connected and part of the same population. In the 19th century, trains connected the populations of nation-states. In the more recent era, planes have produced a physical network for the planet.

Transporting people has greatly solved otherwise impossible problems for increasing the population of the city. But the bigger possibility has been afforded by technologies for facilitating communication entirely separately from the body, aka “telecommunication”. First the oral messenger (“tell your father to come to the field”). Then the written message. Then the telegraph and the telephone. Then a whole proliferation of different media that ephemeralize the means of communication.

The advantages and disadvantages of telecommunication are well-known. By allowing bodies to “stay where they are,” they radically change the energetic and temporal costs of communication. But, by removing the full context of embodiment, they lose an enormous amount of collaborative capacity and raise entirely new problems for both mind and culture.

Until recently, this tradeoff has relegated telecommunications to a secondary role. To be sure, the innovation of the printing press massively increased the communicative capacity of Western civilization and radically rebalanced the psychocultural sensibility of the West. But, even then, the majority of communication was face to face and the center of collaboration was grounded in physical proximity.

Until recently. But since the introduction of the Internet and increasingly since 2020, we have been swiftly moving towards a tipping point where the technologies of communication are providing an adequately rich possibility of relationship that the center of collaboration has or soon will move from the physical to the virtual.

My third thesis: the invention and development of “the digital” brings an end to the cultural logic of the city that has been driving civilization since the beginning. We are now exiting the epoch of the city and entering the epoch of a new relationship. The civium.

From city to civium

Let’s take a moment to examine the nature of “the digital.” When Andreesen pointed out that “software is eating the world,” he wasn’t kidding around. Digital represents the absolute essence of ‘mediation’. Consider: writing mediates some aspects of language while the telephone mediates other aspects. The telegraph still others. A photograph mediates some aspects of image, a moving picture still others. But digital can (and does) perform *all* of these functions. Digital can express any particular form of mediation.

What this means is that this notion of the ephemeralization of communication will reach its ultimate extension somewhere in the domain of the digital. I’m old enough to remember when video calls were as SciFi as flying cars. Now they are a staple of collaboration and provide a richness of relationship *far* beyond a phone call or an email. Are Zoom and FaceTime the nail in the coffin of the city? Perhaps, perhaps not, but they are also not the end of the road for digital. Apple’s “VisionPro” represents a major effort to move the state of the art and this is not the final form of digital either.

Barring a significant social collapse of our technological civilization (which is entirely plausible!) it is just a matter of time. The helter skelter endeavor to solve the problem of how to get more and more people into communication by means of innovation and wealth finds its end point somewhere in the digital.

And if the power of superlinear scaling is as I suggest, then the driver moving the history of civilization will continue to do its work. But, with the center of superlinear scaling moved from the physical to the virtual, the balance of power between these two regimes will begin to shift. While the territorial powers will do their best to hold onto their populations, and may succeed for quite some time, ultimately the dynamo of superlinear scaling will subordinate them, just as the city subordinated the indigenous modes of humanity that preceded it.

In the end, this attractor will seek to bring everyone into a single “network”. But, instead of a giant megalopolis, the forces of superlinear scaling will turn their attentions towards the formation of a planetary network connecting, in principle, all minds.

The story of this planetary network, the dangers it poses, and the diverse forces that will govern its shape and trajectory is interesting, but will have to wait for another telling. The point of focus for this essay is that the shift we are witnessing portends a tremendous change in the winds for our physical lives.

For one thing, the city (as we know it) will begin to fade from the earth. With wealth and innovation increasingly found in the virtual, rather than in the urban, those people who are most lightly connected to the city will begin to go elsewhere. And this produces a feedback loop in the opposite direction: as the population of cities *decrease* their wealth and innovation also will decrease — superlinearly.

Already we have witnessed much of the “cool factor” of culture has moved into the virtual. And even that which is intrinsically physical, has been much more widely distributed by the virtual ability to transmit technique and sensibility: even relatively small rural towns these days have coffee shops just as good as the biggest cities. As the initial migration of people initiates a superlinear decline, we might expect a series of interlocking feedback loops that could accelerate the evaporation of cities. What took thousands of years to create might fade in centuries or even generations.

Of course as people leave cities, they will go somewhere. But where? My thesis is that with the superlinear scaling attractor no longer driving people into cities, the new dominant attractor will become the oldest dominant attractor: we will begin to return to wholesome, human-scale, ‘indigenous’ contexts.

As the earliest pioneers of this new world leave cities in search of a new way of living together, they will begin to congregate around places guided by deep values. Values that guided human choice for hundreds of thousands of years and which have been subordinated by the logic of urbanization for only a brief (ten thousand year) moment.

Liberated from the allure of the city we might expect people to be naturally attracted to places that are physically beautiful, that are safe and clean. Places that are rich in community and make raising a family as easy as it can be. Where meaningful life is most fully supported.

In most cases, of course, we will have to re-build these kinds of places. In most cases, in fact, we will need to re-learn how to live in this way.

Civium is the name that I am giving to a hypothesis: that the most powerful form of network is a properly architected planetary virtual network populated by wholesome, healthy humans who are in intimate relationship with place and each-other.

The transition from city to civium will involve re-building humane places, re-learning how to live properly with each other and our environment, coming into symbiotic relationship with the virtual and re-grounding in the sacred.

We should be mindful that this transition is not one simply of architecture and urban design. Everything is implicated. Governance at human scale is an entirely different kind of problem than the mass governance that we have become used to. Our approaches to food production, physical manufacturing and waste have been entirely defined by the needs and capacities of the city. We will need to invent entirely new economies in the new context of distributed human-scale civium.

Perhaps even more importantly, family and all of the interpersonal elements of life (education, health care, religion) will undergo a profound (and positive) change. In many ways the move to civium will represent a *restoration* of the personal in these areas rendered so impersonal and inhumane by the territorial logic of the city.

All of this is going to take time and, like it or not, a lot of trial and error experimentation. Civium will not be built in a day. But here are some things to consider that are a tailwind in our efforts:

• The fourth industrial revolution really is at hand — but the WEF is completely wrong. They are correct in recognizing that a massive technical wave is sweeping across our economic landscape, but they make the mistake of thinking that the city (and its nature) is an invariant. As a result, they have found themselves imagining “15 minute cities” of the future. But when you realize that the city is no longer the center and investigate the technologies underlying the fourth industrial revolution with new eyes, you notice how perfectly many of these technologies support a highly distributed and highly local economy.
• More and more obviously the “ecological crisis” (sometimes narrowly grasped as “climate change”) requires a level of intimacy and sensitivity to entangled complex reality that the technocratic institutions (and technocratic mindsets) of civilization simply cannot produce. Civium, by contrast, is precisely the right instrument to reorient our physical and spiritual relationship with our environment. A people who are intimately connected to their local water and local land, who are intimately connected with each-other and with themselves, and who are buttressed by the innovative capacity of a superlinear planetary network are properly positioned to take full and proper stewardship of the world.
• The challenge of changing demographics (sometimes identified as “demographic collapse”) might only be addressable by something like civium. If we look at the underlying causation of collapsing birthrates throughout the world, it is a very complex affair. On one hand education and a real change in the necessity of large families (due both to decreased child mortality and a changed economy) have played a role. But on the other hand, things like the precipitous decline in testosterone and sperm count; increase in microplastics and myraids of other toxins; and the dramatic decline in mental health (especially in the West) have played a much less healthy role. To put it simply, it just doesn’t make sense to have and raise children in the city. The opposite is true in every way in civium. (Re)connection to the meaningfulness of wholesome family will be a powerful attractor into civium, and as the people of the city dissolve into below-replacement rate demographics, the people of the civium will naturally replace them over the generations.