MIMIC AND EYES CONTACT IN NAPOLI — The Stigmergy of Traffic
One day a friend from abroad came in visit to Napoli for the first time, and made an observation that I have never noticed before. It started when he was crossing the busy neapolitan streets which at first sight seem chaotic and dangerous, yet the locals handle them with ease. He said, “It’s fascinating the way people are crossing the streets here. Both pedestrians and drivers don’t respect any sign or traffic rules, yet they understand each other perfectly thanks to eye contact”. Inside the flux of traffic people tend to use body language and especially direct eye contact to understand who is the first to start moving. This led us to a discussion regarding following rules vs. natural self-organization. We argued if there is still value in trying old social behaviors.
To support my new theory, I brought up an experiment in self-organization made by Hans Monderman, a traffic expert, in the german city of Bohmte: all traffic signs were removed and that allowed people to use body language and eye contact. The result of the experiment were fewer accidents. The same experiment was replicated with success in other places, following the project of shared cities — where the space is shared between drivers, pedestrians and bikers, and the rules are replaced by self-organization.
My friend was skeptical about successfully repeating the same experiment on a bigger scale, because every country and culture has their own tradition, behavior and rules.
The discussion was left open, until a few days ago in Città della Scienza in Napoli, I was introduced to the concepts of complex systems, emergent behavior and swarm intelligence.
Emergence was coined by the philosopher G.H. Lewes, but another definition that I liked more was by Jeffrey Goldstein, who defined emergence as: “the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems”. 1
Examples in nature are flock of birds, school of fish, termites, bees and ants that through the interaction of their components they do coordinated actions modifying the surrounding (stigmergy). A city and its traffic, life and level of organization could be seen as an example of self-organization and spontaneous order.
Manuel DeLanda defined a city as a natural organism, a living mineral exo-skeleton continuously shaping in a reality governed by a flow of information animated from within by self-organizing processes of human evolution.2
I like to think of cities as a living organism shaped by their citizens, that are able to influence the patterns of urbanism and where the individual behavior is in continuous relation with the entire population. We are more than the sum of people, like “the flock is more than the sum of the birds”.
There are often moments of disorder between a multitude of individuals, but after the disorder something new emerges: a pattern, a decision, a structure, or a change in direction.3 Similar to the neapolitan people who use gestures and eyes contact (their stigmergic language), to get out of traffic jams, and this emergent behavior was developed without any coordination with a central authority. Just like an ant colony which moves without any invisible hand governing them, where each of these social insects are developing its own capacities, and are evolving with an altruism towards a common goal — in their case the survival and continuation of the colony.
So I asked my friend if there was still a reason to chart a fixed path in the city and have a central control from government that is deciding rules for us? People will follow a different path anyway, often shorter and more optimal for them.
Our humanity complex system can govern itself and it does already in different levels every day, just because we are a multitude and we communicate with each other. And inevitably another question comes: if the horde doesn’t have an invisible God hand controlling, it means that also humans don’t need!?
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1 Emergence meaning — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
2 Pag 1–2 -5 — Relinquishing Control: Reactions to Emergence — Dimitrie Andrei Stefanescu, TU Delf
3 Miller, Peter. 2010. The Smart Swarm: How understanding flocks, schools, and colonies can make us better at communicating, decision making, and getting things done
