IT SEEMS APPROPRIATE, in this first edition of Urban Progress, to begin with a simple question: What is a city? Is a city simply a collection of individuals with a shared culture? Is a city better defined by its location and physical attributes: its geography, along with its buildings, streets, sewers, and parks? Or is a city its institutions? The municipality, which governs; schools, which educate; and businesses, which serve our daily needs? Each, on its own, seems necessary to pin down the essence of any city but not sufficient to make one. Is a city, then, the sum of all these parts? That seems reasonable at first, but with just a bit of prodding, we are forced into uncomfortable questions. When the citizens age and die and young people take their places, has the city died also? If the population is forced to flee elsewhere, is the city still there? If a city loses a beloved park, is it no longer a city? If a natural disaster lays low its buildings, which are then rebuilt, is it the same city as before or a new one? When the government changes or businesses fail, is it the same city that remains? Given the importance of cities to human progress, to our various cultures and economies, it seems surprising that there isn’t a crisp or commonly understood definition of what a city is. It’s one of those concepts with borders so fuzzy that we’re stuck with fleeting definitions that serve only immediate needs and don’t persist across disciplines. For example, we might think of a city as a labour market when we study its economics, or as a collection of buildings when we study its architecture, or as a web of institutions when we study its sociology. But what is consistent across those domains? What allows us to grapple with the city as a whole, to remain cognizant of its complexity when crafting policy and planning for the future? What is a city?

There Is No City

IN THE MILINDA PANHA, a Buddhist text written around 2,000 years ago, the sage Nāgasena meets King Milinda for the first time. While introducing himself, the sage startles the king by claiming to be nothing more than a name, without existence or identity. _I am known as Nāgasena, O king, and it is by that name that my brethren address me. But Nāgasena, Sire, is only a generally understood term, a word. There is no permanent person, no soul, here before you. _ The king finds this absurd. How can it be that there is no sage, when a living, breathing man is standing before him? _If, most reverend Nāgasena, there is no permanent person, no soul, here before me, then who is it who accepts clothing and nourishment? Who lives a life of righteousness? Who is it who sins, steals, and lies? If a man were to kill you, would there be no murder? _ The king goes further, insisting that surely Nāgasena must understand himself as some kind of irreducible entity, a collection of parts that amount to a singular being. Do you mean to say that the hair is Nāgasena? Is it the nails, the teeth, the organs, or the bones? Is it the name alone? Is it the senses, the perceptions, the mind, or the consciousness that is Nāgasena? Is there any part of Nāgasena outside of these elements? One by one, Nāgasena replies that he is none of these things, and there is no part of him that lies outside of the king’s exhaustive list. King Milinda appears to have won the debate. But Nāgasena turns the king’s own argument against him. Having noticed that the king arrived in a chariot, he asks: Explain to me what a chariot is. Is it the pole that is the chariot? Is it the axle? Is it the wheels, the ropes, or the yoke that are the chariot? Is there anything outside of these elements that is the chariot? To all of these questions, the king reluctantly answers no and points out that the word “chariot” applies to the interactions between all of these various parts and the person who uses the chariot. There is no “chariot” outside of these relationships. With that, the sage praises the king for arriving at the ultimate truth. In the same way, he explains, “Nāgasena” is nothing more than a recognizable set of interactions that emerge from physical and social elements. In a very real sense, there is no Nāgasena standing before the king. This can be a helpful way to think about cities, which similarly are not their inhabitants, their infrastructure, or their institutions, but rather an ensemble of interactions between these. The constituent pieces don’t matter very much—it’s the emergent picture that does. Let’s call this idea No City. No City is why we intuitively understand that New York remains New York, even after centuries of destruction and construction. Even as waves of generations, each with different cultures and preferences, have come and gone. Even as the city’s institutions have grown and adapted, such that they would be unrecognizable to someone born in 1750. There is No City. Like the paradoxical Ship of Theseus, whose wood planks were gradually replaced until not one original piece remained, we understand that New York is the most New York–like place on earth, even though almost none of the original New York remains. There is No City. So where does this leave us? If we accept that the proper way of understanding our cities is not as collections of people, places, and things, how does this help us solve problems springing up in urban places around the world, such as the unaffordability of housing, the cost of building, and the difficulty of innovation? Fortunately, science is catching up with religious and philosophical insights and can provide a useful model for understanding the kind of emergent, complex phenomena that characterize our cities.

Dissipative City

IN 1977, RUSSIAN-BELGIAN SCIENTIST Ilya Prigogine won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on thermodynamics. Prigogine was able to propel natural science into a new paradigm by recognizing two kinds of thermodynamic systems: conservative and dissipative. Conservative systems are those which we learn about in school, governed by the famous laws of thermodynamics (“energy cannot be created or destroyed”; “the entropy of the universe increases”). These laws describe flows of energy through space and time that behave in discretely measurable, reversible, and predictable ways. For example, this framework accurately describes how your refrigerator creates a cold interior chamber by removing heat and ejecting it to the surrounding room. By simply reversing the direction of its heat pump, the same appliance could draw heat from the room and use it to raise the temperature of the chamber, transforming the refrigerator into an oven. The amount of energy in the system doesn’t change—reversing the heat pump redirects its flow but the energy still needs to go somewhere: somehow or another, whether by heating or by cooling, it will be conserved. Dissipative systems, in contrast, evolve probabilistically, irreversibly, and into unpredictable future states. They give rise to every living organism on our planet. A biological system, like a human being, defies cellular death by continually replenishing itself with new energy and new matter. These systems exist in a constant state of disequilibrium; they must always be tilted toward change to retain their structures. Order can emerge from disorder in these systems, in a way that it cannot in classical ones. Prigogine further understood that a dissipative system could not exist except in conjunction with its environment. In other words, a dissipative system is not a static object that can be relocated to a lab and studied, like a sample of rock. It cannot be disassembled, reassembled, or run in reverse, like a steam engine. When you open the drain of a full bathtub, the whirlpool that forms is a dissipative structure: it exists only in its particular place and only with a continual flow of matter and energy to sustain it. If you turn off the tap, the structure disappears after a short time. Prigogine recognized that when dissipative structures approach equilibrium (in my example, when the water runs out of the tub), they are destroyed, but when they push further from equilibrium (when more water is added), they can be sustained and sometimes attain even higher levels of order. The most remarkable thing about the emergent nature of these structures is their sheer improbability. The chance of any ordered state arising spontaneously from disorder is infinitesimal. If you throw a box of dominoes on the ground, the odds of them landing in a perfect pyramid is essentially zero. And yet order arises from disequilibrated systems all the time, giving rise to all life on earth, all biological structures—and, yes, human cities. Prigogine’s influence has extended well beyond his own discipline, changing the way that people think about complexity, cybernetics, the philosophy of information, human consciousness, and, in my own case, the nature and health of cities. His concept of the dissipative structure clicks together nicely with our concept of No City. An organism is not the sum of its recent meals or its environment or its social status. It’s the relationships of these elements that defines a dog, a monkey, or a human being. A living creature is a system that relies on constant replenishment and change—metabolism, growth, adaptation—in order to stay alive and healthy. A dissipative structure, any creature or city, that is forced into equilibrium, which cannot grow, cannot learn, and cannot adapt to new external challenges, will die.

The City Emerges

WE HUMAN BEINGS have been building cities, including many great cities, for millennia. We have been working with similar constraints and solving similar problems for this entire span of time: how to acquire and distribute the goods needed to sustain an urban population; how to ensure proper sanitation and waste removal; how to adjudicate the conflicts and political tensions that naturally arise when many people live together in high densities; how to organize and maintain public space; how to ensure social order and public safety. We have many centuries of experience dealing with these dissipative systems, which have flourished all over the world and have been the engines of tremendous prosperity for humankind. This deep experience appears to be failing us now, as cities everywhere fall victim to cost sickness, housing unaffordability, failing trust in institutions, social disorder, and, perhaps most alarmingly, an inability to simply change direction when we identify that things are not going well. Armed with our new concepts—No City and dissipative structures—we are better equipped to make sense of these failures. Our cities are, in a sense, living things. Cities throughout history have failed—Rome, Babel, Thebes—and for a variety of reasons. But it is curious that so many cities are facing such similar challenges at exactly the same time, despite having very different cultures, political systems, and geographies. Why is it that housing crises are arising at the same time in Canada and the US, in the UK and Australia, and in Scandinavia, for example? Why are local institutions being challenged by populist movements in similar ways all across the developed world? Why is productivity growth falling just about everywhere? It’s my intuition that many of these challenges are rooted in one central misunderstanding: we think that our cities exist in a world of classical systems—one where energy and matter move through space in predictable, measurable, and reversible ways. Urban planners from wealthy nations across the world have come to believe that cities can be modelled and administered from above to achieve predetermined, idealized outcomes. We believe that cities are, to borrow from Le Corbusier, “machines for living in”: mechanical objects that require some optimal configuration of key elements—sewers, roads, buildings, and people—to sustain the health and well-being of their inhabitants. We behave as though change is dangerous and insist that it must be tightly managed. The error in this way of thinking is that it leads us to privilege the constituent parts—today’s inhabitants, today’s buildings, today’s social structures—over the health of an ensemble that requires constant renewal. It causes us to focus too much on the material design of the city rather than on creating the conditions for success to emerge. Cities, just like their inhabitants, are not static objects with optimal structures that can be laid out with plans and blueprints. We inhabit Prigogine’s world, where order arises from millions of small interactions between people and their environment, situated one layer above the sewers, roads, buildings, and people. In this world, health means adaptation, evolution, and venturing far from the perceived safety of equilibrium. We seem oblivious to the well-being of the emergent city and stifle the kinds of change that replenish and nourish our urban places. In short, we are taking dissipative structures and insisting that they behave as conservative ones. Our urban-planning processes freeze neighborhoods in amber, reflecting mid-20th-century social structures that no longer exist. Developers are not allowed to meet the demands and desires of a growing, changing population. North American land-use restrictions—which strictly regulate the number and relationships of building inhabitants—ensure that today’s inequalities will persist for generations. Even the simplest, most established types of businesses must undergo public comment, bureaucratic review, and municipal approval before they can operate, preventing the kind of fast, inexpensive experimentation that has traditionally given rise to great urban places. We have created urban systems where no feedback loops are built in because their desired outcomes are defined at the start. And, because we design mechanistic systems that are not supposed to adapt, they eventually become useless in the face of shifting reality, changing demographics, and new technologies. We fail to see that equilibrium itself can be a threat to our collective well-being. This brings us to some obvious questions. What might a better approach to planning and building look like? How do we create the conditions for generational prosperity rather than design systems that protect the interests of discrete constituencies and that struggle to evolve? How might we focus urban planning more on investing for generations? How might we take another Buddhist principle—letting go of our most cherished attachments—to accomplish more by doing less? Answering these questions will be the core project of Urban Progress.

Brendan Whitsett is a real estate developer and investor who specializes in creating exceptional rental communities and innovative urban places.