As I stated in my previous posts, The Atlas of Social Complexity is comprised of several content themes.
The first major content theme in The Atlas of Social Complexity is Cognition, Emotion and Consciousness. This first theme includes six chapters, which I have so far blogged on. Chapter 6 addresses autopoiesis. Chapter 7 turns to the role of bacteria in human consciousness. Chapter 8 explores how the immune system, just like bacteria and cells, is cognitive – and the implications this has for our wider brain-based consciousness. Chapter 9 explores a complexity framing of brain-based cognition, emotion and consciousness. Chapter 10 explores the complex multilevel dynamics of the Self. Chapter 11 is about human-machine intelligence.
The second major content theme in The Atlas of Social Complexity is The Dynamics of Human Psychology. So far for this theme, I’ve given a basic overview, found here. I then moved on to the first theme, Human psychology as dynamical system (Chapter 13). From there I reviewed Chapter 14: Psychopathology of mental disorders ; Chapter 15: Healing and the therapeutic process; and Chapter 16: Mindfulness, imagination, and creativity.
The third
major theme is living in social systems
(Chapter 17). The first chapter in this section is Complex social psychology
(Chapter 18). From there we move on to Collective behaviour, social movements
and mass psychology (Chapter 19). Next is Configurational Social
Science (Chapter 20).
The focus of the current post is CHAPTER 21: THE LOCAL AND THE GLOBAL: COMPLEXITIES OF PLACE
OVERVIEW OF CHAPTERS 21
The Information Age, Castells 1996. C.E. Up to this point on our tour we have made significant progress in understanding the social psychology and collective behaviour of living in social systems. We have also made substantial progress in positioning people (be they individuals, groups, communities) in terms of the intersecting social structures and the configurations of factors that drive their system-based experiences. As a next step on our tour, we will bring in the socio-geographical to explore people and their social systems in (geographical) time and space, ranging from the local to the global. Our chapter is organised as follows. We begin with a few preliminaries, most of which involve us narrowing in on our primary target: the complexities of cities and the global urban.
HERE ARE SOME (BUT CERTAINLY NOT ALL) OF THE HIGHLIGHTS FROM THIS CHAPTER:
- Social complexity plays out in spaces: in villages and in cities, in buildings and on the road, in hospitals and in schools.
- The globalizing world has added more dimensions to the role of space in social complexity, as places became entangled in worldwide digital and transportation networks and increasing social mobilities.[1]
- Globalisation has also brought about a highly mobile world, both physically and digitally.[2]
-
For a short
time, some scholars thought that the space of flows and global mobilities would
render physical locations less important. The opposite has happened. It
reinforced cities and metropolitan areas as central nodes to create clusters
and networks of megacities or super-cities[3]
and enhanced spatial inequalities.[4]
- The traditional analytical distinction between city and countryside has become thoroughly obsolete in an age of the sprawling megapolis and megaregions, which have absorbed individual towns and suburbs into one continuous fabric.[5],[6]
- As our opening argument elucidates, a thorough revision of how we understand the (globalized) urban is needed.[7]
- Importantly, the notion of ‘space’ is multifaceted. Not only is this about networks and temporal attunement, but it is also about the differences between the physical space, the experienced space at the level of individual urban dwellers, and abstract symbolic spaces.[8]
- Complex spaces immediately conjure up images of contemporary cities. And yes, cities are important expressions of complex spaces. However, there is another aspect that is equally important: the spatial dimension of complexity sciences itself, such as attractor spaces and fitness landscapes.
- The surprising thing about time, and its relationship with space, in the complexity sciences is that it plays a key role in understanding complexity; yet it is usually captured in a fashion that prohibits true exploration. Complexity plays out over time. Without the time dimension, we wouldn’t observe emergence, non-linearity, hysteresis and path-dependence, to name a few key notions from the first chapters of this Atlas.
- The biggest hurdle in unpacking time is not how we understand emergence but rather how it is projected upon time units. Indeed, time in the complexity sciences is usually treated as sui generis and as a uniform measure.[9] Thus, emergence is distributed across uniform units such as ticks in a simulation or clock time (minutes, days, years, etc.).
- This convention is deeply ingrained in research, not in the least because it is a workable and understandable proxy for social processes. The main problem with all this is that it imposes a regimentation on any observation.[10]
- Time is a social institution that, by extension, varies from one space to another.[11] Arguably, contemporary time and its regimentation are hallmarks of industrialization and the emergence of the big city[12], creating what Adam[13] calls a ‘time-grid’ that characterizes contemporary society.
- An important step in understanding how else we could capture time in the study of social complexity, we should also highlight the intricate relationships between time and space. Time-space dualities have been criticized for creating false dichotomies.[14]
-
From a
system’s perspective, one might argue that clock time would capture movements
more accurately. From the perspective of within-case variation, it is the
experience of time that is more important. It points to the importance of pace
or velocity.
Again, lots more on the topic, but you need to read the chapter to find out! :)
KEY WORDS: space; urban; cities; time-space; space of flows; local;
global; time; planning; time; urban simulation; geospatial modelling
[1] In addition to Castells, see John Urry, The Tourist Gaze (Sage, 2002); John Urry, Sociology beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, 2012).
[2] Mimi Sheller and John Urry, ‘Mobilizing the New Mobilities Paradigm’, Applied Mobilities 1, no. 1 (2016): 10–25; Jonas Larsen and John Urry, Mobilities, Networks, Geographies (Routledge, 2016).
[3] Jonathan V. Beaverstock, Richard G. Smith, and Peter J. Taylor, ‘World-City Network: A New Metageography?’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90, no. 1 (2000): 123–34.
[4] Ali Madanipour, ‘“Social Exclusion, Space, and Time”’, in The City Reader, 7th ed. (Routledge, 2020).
[5] Jennifer Robinson, Comparative Urbanism (Sussex: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2022).
[6] To some, the level of urbanization has become so vast that one should accept that all forms of human settlement are urban, i.e., planetary urbanism, see e.g., Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, trans. Gerald Moore and Stuart Elden (London ; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). And while the process of urbanization is just as complex as the actual places itself, Robinson rightly points out that this concepts must be treated with some caution. The similarities and dissimilarities of places matter.
[7] Neil Brenner and Roger Keil, ‘From Global Cities to Globalized Urbanization’, Glocalism: Journal of Culture, Politics and Innovation, no. 3 (2014).
[8] David Harvey, ‘Space as a Keyword’, in David Harvey (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2006), 70–93.
[9] Lasse Gerrits, Robin A. Chang, and Sofia Pagliarin, ‘Case-Based Complexity: Within-Case Time Variation and Temporal Casing’, Complexity, Governance & Networks 7, no. 1 (2 May 2022): 29.
[10] Gerrits, Chang, and Pagliarin.
[11] E. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. J. Swain (London: Allen & Unwin, 1968).
[12] G. Simmel, Le Metropoli e La Vita Dello Spirito (Rome: Armando Editore, 1903).
[13] B. Adam, Timewatch: The Social Analysis of Time (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995).
[14] N. Thrift, ‘Torsten Hägerstrand and Social Theory’, Progress in Human Geography 29, no. 3 (2005): 337–40; N. Thrift, ‘Space, Place, and Time: Chapter 29’, in The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, ed. Robert E. Goodin and Charles Tilly, Oxford Handbooks of Political Science (Oxford: New York and Oxford University Press, 2006), 547–63.
[15] Gieryn, Thomas F. "A space for place in sociology." Annual review of sociology 26, no. 1 (2000): 463-496. Urry, John. "The sociology of space and place." The Blackwell companion to sociology (2001): 3-15.
[16] Thomas Weber, Jorge Louçã, and Lasse Gerrits, ‘Dissipative Structures and the Relation between Individual and Collective Aspects of Social Behavior’, Systems Research and Behavioral Science 39, no. 2 (March 2022): 274–86, https://doi.org/10.1002/sres.2777.
[17] See, as a few key examples, P. Allen, ‘Self-Organization and Evolution in Urban Systems’, Cities and Regions as Non-Linear Decision Systems, 1 January 1984, 29–62; Gert de Roo and Ward S. Rauws, ‘Positioning Planning in the World of Order, Chaos and Complexity: On Perspectives, Behaviour and Interventions in a Non-Linear Environment’, in Complexity Theories of Cities Have Come of Age: An Overview with Implications to Urban Planning and Design, ed. Juval Portugali et al. (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2012), 207–20; Gert de Roo and Elisabete A. Silva, A Planner’s Encounter with Complexity (London: Routledge, 2010); Ward Rauws and Gert De Roo, ‘Adaptive Planning: Generating Conditions for Urban Adaptability. Lessons from Dutch Organic Development Strategies’, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 43, no. 6 (1 November 2016): 1052–74; Juval Portugali, ‘Complexity Theory as a Link between Space and Place’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 38, no. 4 (1 April 2006): 647–64.
[18] Beyond the general observation that cities are complicated, that is.
[19] Antonio Isalgue, Helena Coch, and Rafael Serra, ‘Scaling Laws and the Modern City’, Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and Its Applications 382, no. 2 (15 August 2007): 643–49.
[20] Big data analysis about cities runs into the same issues that plague big data analysis everywhere.
[21] Michael Batty, ‘Big Data, Smart Cities and City Planning’, Dialogues in Human Geography 3, no. 3 (November 2013): 274–79.
