CRITERIA FOR DEVELOPING MEDIATED URBAN NERVOUS SYSTEMS: A COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS PERSPECTIVE

ABSTRACTAs communication technology becomes increasingly sophisticated and hierarchical power diminishes in Western Society, there is a concomitant increase in the complexity of public and private collective behavior and in the information and communication needed to support healthy cities. This paper uses complexity theory to set forth a framework for mediated urban nervous systems which facilitate shared understanding and collaboration at all system levels in urban areas.Key words: city, complex adaptive systems, cybernetics, emergence, feedback, feedforward, ICT, urban communicationThere is a growing body of scholarship that enhances the understanding of communication in urban environments (Burd, Drucker, and Gumpert, 2007; Castells, 1996; Horrigan, 2001; Jeffres, 2003; Sassen, 2002; Sassen et al., 2007). The Urban Communication Foundation (Gumpert and Drucker, 2007) calls attention to the challenges to cities as healthy entities because cities face serious challenges from a number of internal and external sources.This theoretical paper brings together concepts and research from media ecology, complex systems theory, sociology, cybernetics, and human-computer interface design to propose an approach to monitoring and improving city health using feedback and feedforward mechanisms which simultaneously support management by government authorities, civil leaders, interventions by community groups, and the efforts of "bottoms-up" emergent peer groups.Systems researchers (Allison, 2005; Bar-Yam, 1997; Kauffman, 1993; Luhmann, 1989; Mainzer, 1996) argue that human groups-including cities-are living complex adaptive social systems. Thus the literature on the complex adaptive systems (CAS) and evolution of emergent systems can be used as a framework to support urban communication systems which promote the health of a city as a whole as well as the residents and groups within and connected to it. It is both possible and desirable to consciously build elements of a city's mediated communication and information nervous system taking into account these characteristics, while simultaneously recognizing, connecting with, and amplifying elements which arise "unofficially." The primary aim of this paper is to put forward this framework and to illuminate some of the implications. To instantiate the possibilities, a review of a few examples of information and communication technologies (ICT) which facilitate intelligence in urban groups follows.Context: Cities Change in Punctuated EquilibriumAs low-cost, easily portable ICT becomes simultaneously increasingly sophisticated, networked, and widely distributed, there are many important changes (Allison, 2005; Bar-Yam, n.d.a, b; boyd, 2006, 2008; Giddens, 2000; Laszlo, 1996, 2000; Levy, 1997, 1998, 2001) in the ways in which human groups-including cities-are organized.In a multiple-cause and multiple-effect relationship characteristic of complex adaptive systems (CAS), there are, of course, other significant triggers of changes taking place in cities-as well as the larger social systems in which they are nested, such as nation states, and the smaller social systems nested inside them, such as neighborhoods. The development and diffusion of high-speed computing and graphic design, improvements in medicine, and developments in transportation contribute to the rapid increase in knowledge and ideas; communication, travel, and immigration; global commerce-all of which stress the traditional bureaucratic structure and formal processes of traditional city organization and governance.Societies-and the groups within them-show increased complexity in a pattern of punctuated equilibrium-rapid bursts of change followed by periods of relative stability. Eldredge, Alcosser, and Gould (1991) first described this pattern which they found in the fossil records of biological species. Additional studies (Allison, 2005; Bar-Yam, n.d.a; Laszlo, 1996) show that punctuated equilibrium theory is a useful explanatory model for the pattern of changes in human social systems. …