Experts Think Cities Don’t Behave Like Organisms, But I Am of a Different Opinion
Cities can be considered organisms
I haven’t been to many cities yet here I am commenting about them.
The naïve youth in me still believes I need to have my ideas out there. It is a product of being born and brought up in a city.
Cities are reactors. They amplify what one already has as much as a catalyst does to reactions. If you have ever been to Nairobi, you know how fast people can walk. It is difficult to find the same fast pace in distant residential places. If you do, chances are they might be rushing to avoid missing the start of a big Champions League football match. Besides that, the only place where you’ll see someone walking fast is in the heart of a city, often in the morning or at the rush hour, in the evening.
In Deep Simplicity, John Gribbin mentions the similarity between gravity and cities. As I paused midway through the book to think of the inverse square law, I was on board the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) headed for the annual Kenya Orthopaedics Association Conference. It was then that I contemplated the possibility of cities behaving just like organisms.
Already, scientists were thinking that gravity, viewed in the Newtonian sense, could explain the relationship between a city’s population and the number of people it attracted. It was mysteriously robust. The larger the city, the more people it attracted.
Luis Bettencourt, perhaps the world’s leading expert on the science of cities explains vividly why this is not the case. This much I can contend. However, I don’t believe cities are far from organisms. They just might be an evolved version.
Here’s how.
Here’s how you behave
Before drawing parallels with the city, we need to have some basic understanding of how organisms behave and their structure.
I like to think of organisms from a thermodynamic point of view as a proper starting point. Organisms are open systems that are structurally closed. They are open in the sense that they can consume components from their environment to produce useful energy. Useful for them. This is an important point.
What might be useful for me might not be useful for you. I can take a book on pathology and read it for a good two hours and find it useful. If you’re not familiar with biological sciences or not interested in high-stakes medicine, the book is pointless.
The book shows how open I am as a system. I can then use the knowledge I have acquired to treat patients better since I know the details of how a disease process unfolds.
If, however, I open a book on quantum mechanics, I will be no different than those who swim on the Dead Sea — floating effortlessly.
Organisms are also structurally closed. I know this is Michelle or Stuart because they have an outline. Their structure is distinct. The boundary has important evolutionary roles which I will not get into in this article.
You and I pee. And poo. We pee and poo as much as we eat. These are the products of metabolism that are not of value to us. Since we’re thermodynamically open, we can ingest, digest, and for those products we don’t need, egest.
Our bladders and rectum fill up but we don’t spend all day in the washrooms or toilets. These products can be contained for a while but past a certain size threshold, they have to come out. This is another important point we’ll have to come back to.
The last bit I would like to bring to your attention is universal in all organisms — they tend to avoid annihilation. This feature underpins all I have already discussed. By being thermodynamically open, they will harness energy to continue avoiding death. By being structurally closed, they will assert their existence if anybody doubts them or threatens them. By having means of releasing waste, they self-preserve and hence avoid self-destruction.
Now, cities.
Here’s how cities behave and why I think they are unique organisms
Luis Bettencourt describes cities as dense concentrations of social relationships in space and time.
This will be our reference point. If you live in one or have ever visited one or several, this definition is a fair one.
As for its features, cities are thermodynamically open.
They allow for people to get in and out. A city is alive because of the people in it. It is these people who attract more people to go to cities. Often, the young ones want to improve their lives and opt for the best way of doing that — going to the city.
Cities are also structurally closed. A map of a country gives you a rough idea of the boundaries of a city. Just like organisms, cities have different forms and shapes. Its primary infrastructure scales sublinearly in the way the structures of an organism scale.
Defining the boundary of a city has no consensus. Some prefer using percolation theories while others prefer how far one can commute from the heart of the city.
A rule of thumb you can use is to see the pace of socioeconomic activities. As earlier alluded, the pace inside the heart of Nairobi is fast. When you go to Komarock, it gets slower. It is even slower as you head toward Saika, Ruai, or Mihang’o.
A few weeks ago, I attended the annual Rotary District Conference Assembly at Watamu. To cap the awarding ceremony, we visited a local club. The pace with which we were served drinks was so slow that I gave a friend a drink that he didn’t pay for while still waiting for the bartender to receive the payment. I tried to be cooperative and helpful, but it seemed like she was never used to the numbers that flocked their space.
I gave her my phone to key in the pay bill, but she kept holding on to it. When I asked for it, she didn’t even know what she was doing with it. To save her the trouble, I just went with my drink. For free. When I came back for a second drink, she barely recognized me.
The pace of activity in Watamu, the town, is different from that of a city such as Mombasa.
It brings me back to the peeing and pooing. Cities do the same. Factory and vehicle emissions are ways our ‘organism’ releases its waste. But consider the rates of growing slums. The bigger the city, the more it has these residential places. An elephant takes a bigger dump than the Big Show. The size of a slum is roughly positively correlated with the size of the city.
Within these narrow lanes, the transport is archaic, largely by foot, or if advanced, a tuk-tuk or a bicycle. Hygiene and sanitation are poor and insecurity is a norm. These are the poop and the pee that the city, as an organism, ejects from itself. It hardly needs it much the same way we don’t need what we egest when we visit the washrooms.
Now, these are all somewhat similar and difficult to side with because data on cities is barely being robustly studied as organisms in every known biological lab. One factor, nevertheless, makes experts think that cities are different — scale.
Scale — biological organisms vs cities
Organisms scale sublinearly.
The most documented, debated, and discussed example is Kleiber’s law. It states that the metabolic activity of an organism scales with a factor of ¾. If the mass doubles, the energy does not double. It is much less.
What that means is the larger the organism, the less energy it will require.
Klieber’s law has its shortcomings, but it is a guide. It tells us about the overall trend of biological organisms. They become efficient with size.
Cities, experts argue, do the opposite. They scale superlinearly. What they look at follows from Bettencourt’s definition of cities — a dense concentration of social relationships. The variables that give this superlinear scale are also social products such as patent productions, wages, wealth, and education institutions. These scale at a rate of 1.15.
Now you know why cities are a catalyst.
However, some of the core infrastructure does not scale superlinearly. These include the length of roads, electrical cables, number of water pipes and petrol stations. These features scale sublinearly at 0.85. They behave like an organism.
Arguably the most interconnected organ in our body also behaves like the city. With close to 100 billion neurons, the brain has over 100 trillion connections. These are just the neurons. We are yet to discuss the neuroglia, such as astrocytes, which also create connections with neurons. The brain is also a dense concentration of neuronal and neuroglial relationships.
The cerebral grey and white matter scales superlinearly. In the book, Scale, West puts it at 1.25. It is a part of us that consumes a lot of energy. A city does the same. With such a scale, it is no wonder we get so many ideas, Our brains behave like reactors, just like stars, which generate a lot of new elements.
Looking at how the brain is structured and densely connected, I can only think of another physical entity that rivals that — a black hole. Black holes are so densely packed, that the energy they warp makes it difficult for particles, including light, to escape.
It’s difficult to destroy a black hole. It is also difficult to destroy a city. Hiroshima and Nagasaki thrive to date despite the atomic bombings. It takes us to the very last and evolutionarily important feature of cities — their tendency to avoid annihilation.
Bombs can’t take them down. They reconstitute and rebuild. To kill a city is to kill the life source — the people. And since they are densely packed, our current weaponry does not guarantee killing everyone.
Cities do behave like organisms.
What I’m trying to say is…
That cities are not studied by biologists does not mean they lack features similar to organisms.
Biologists would demand to know where they would be classified in the tree of life. It’s obvious that they would not feature anywhere.
But if we loosen our grip on this pillar we have known for so long, then we could begin to see just how cities are organisms, at least, as viewed by the Organismal Selection theory of evolution.
Maybe this could also be a perspective the experts in the science of cities could consider besides just looking at the scaling laws.
