ANALOGIES: Analogues of Cities

This Feasibility Account is designed to develop, deepen, realise and disseminate the role of analogies or 'shared abstractions' that we continually and routinely make in developing and speculating upon the way complex systems function. Nowhere is this more evident that in systems that are intrinsically ill-defined, manifesting a degree of complexity where the scientific canons of parsimony are difficult to engender. Indeed complexity theory has been largely developed to map more abstract structures onto such systems and to exploit their correspondence through analogies. Cities are the example par excellence. Indeed analogies between the human body and the city go back to Plato, and have remained central to the sorts of shared abstractions that have pervaded the language of architects and planners since the time of Leonardo da Vinci and Vitruvius. The notion that the form of the city and the body represent similar systems in which their shape represents the system for transporting energy to their parts (radial routes and streets v. arteries and veins) from their economic cores (central business district v. heart) has been deeply embedded in the rhetoric of city planning for more than century. What we will do in this project is develop a series of key analogies between the way cities function and various electrical, mechanical, biological and human systems such as fluid flows, potential energies and electricity, and dynamic mechanisms, exploring these analogies in a depth that has not been possible hitherto. We now have a veritable cornucopia of such shared abstractions and it is opportune to begin to assemble these and formalise them so that, in the first instance, they will inform as to the best ways forward in developing the many models that are used to examine the functions and structure of cities. Deepening these analogies is thus our first quest. Our second is to translate these analogies into models or analogues that we might realise in tangible form, using the term tangible to span the material and the digital. The process of constructing such analogues is quite new. In the past, these have been developed in an ad hoc manner but in this project we will develop them in symbolic terms as far we can and then translate them into physical and digital analogues. The third quest is to locate these in an environment that users who will include our own inter-disciplinary team as well as professional stakeholders can learn from these models, improving their understanding, their problem solving capabilities and the power of their designs. We will call the mini-media lab An Outlook Tower for the 21st Century after the example of Sir Patrick Geddes who was an early exponent of this mode of participation. This environment will be portable and reproducible and we will seek to engage with stakeholders in communities using UCL's Beacon of Engagement initiative, once the project has developed the requisite materials.

Our Feasibility Account is structured in such a way that Activities B and C - realisation and dissemination of our analogies as analogues - define the pathways to the impact that the deliverables from Activities 1 to 5 (which are bundled together as Activity A) will produce. Our most visible outputs will be tangible media (in which we include virtual models using digital media tailored to particular digital devices) that we will embody in our analogues. These we will disseminate in a hands-on environment in which those who use our media can explore them in diverse ways. Our media will be mainly digital and physical (in terms of manufactured/constructed artefacts) but we will also explore less permanent materials involving biologies and more sensitive forms that are less easy to control. Our goal in developing analogies in this way is to develop a way of disseminating our research into applications and ultimately into the planning and design of complex systems, cities of course, but socio-technical systems more generally. To do this, contemporary digital media is of the essence. We are not developing exhibits in the traditional sense but we are developing a forum for engaging with other scientists and informed stakeholders who have a central interest in using these technologies to design better systems, cities. A century or more ago, a not dissimilar enterprise was started by the biologist Sir Patrick Geddes, widely regarded as the father of modern British town planning, and his focus in evolutionary theory with respect to town planning has strong echoes with our contemporary development of complexity theory. Geddes was a polymath, working in many fields but bringing his art and science to the widest audience through his Outlook Tower in Edinburgh and then through his Town Planning and Cities Exhibition. Our understanding of cities is now being reinvented using the sciences of complexity and in our ideas about analogies, we think of our proposal as being one of building an Outlook Tower for the 21st Century . We consider that developing pathways in this manner, will enable us to convince many to extend and support our use of media in this fashion. The Town and Country Planning Association is the forum which is most likely to support our effort for what we are doing is close to their mission. We also consider that we might publicise our Outlook Tower through the Royal Society's summer science exhibitions, and possibly we might entice the British Academy to extend its support to our effort. What we wish to do is establish an initiative in publicising and popularising our science so that it has immediate impact on those empowered to design our future cities and to implement policies of sustainability. In Activity C, we will also relate the analogies we are working with to other variants such as those that are both implicit and explicit in EPSRC's Sustainable Urban Environments programme which is drawing to a close but has established important and lasting new science for cities. We have good contacts in all these organisations although we have not yet contacted them to elicit their support but two of us are Fellows of the BA and three of us are Fellows of the RS. We also intend to interact with a small number of high profile consulting companies who use analogues of the kind we are developing to demonstrate their work. Arup have a variety of cognate models as do Space Syntax Ltd. UCL is one of six Beacons of Public Engagement nationwide, initiatives designed to get the University to be more closely involved with their local community. This is funded by a consortium involving RCUK, HEFCE and the Wellcome Trust. The Beacon presents us with some institutional apparatus to continue with the development of our Outlook Tower idea after the formal funding has ended.