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raxFirst sentence: "We live in a world populated by structures --- a complex mixture of geological, biological, social, and linguistic constructions that are nothing but accumulations of materials shaped and hardened by history." I like this already.
Buildings as a parallel to bone, allowing for movement that wasn't possible for flesh previously. <3 Author points out that cities are not organisms in "A state of internal equilibrium" and it's important to consider them as "dynamical systems operating far from equilibrium."
Birth of Europe made possible by the ability to much more efficiently exploit soil. (I bet there's a parallel here to technological shifts allowing us to much more efficiently exploit oil; earlier de Landa says that we developed cities in the first place because we more efficiently exploited solar power through plant cultivation.) Oh right he mentions that parallel in, like, the next paragraph. Go me.
"Bureaucracies have always arisen to effect a planned extraction of energy surpluses." Bureaucracies as homogenous hierarchies, markets (like a farmer's market not like an Almacs [0]) as heterogeneous. Meshworks versus hierarchies! de Landa: "meshworks and hierarchies not only coexist and intermingle, they constantly give rise to one another. For example, as markets grow in size, they tend to form commercial hierarchies."
On page 12, a bunch of things about how "explosive" change can't happen when hierarchy overwhelms meshwork and that's why Europe was dominant for a millenium. ...really? de Landa holds the authors saying that at a distance, it will be interesting to see wehre he goes with it. Certainly mostly-hierarchical systems and mostly-meshy systems are going to behave somewhat differently...
Money as: energy but in the opposite direction, political rather than economic, a catalyst.
"not only resources change hands in the market but also property rights" has been said twice so I guess I should write it down. I mean, this seems kind of obvious to me?
Difference between looking at totalities and large-scale entities --- looking at cities lets us examine patterns but maintain specificity. Groups of cities can themselves form hierarchical patterns. Cities can also form meshworks. Long-distance trading centers are an example of that. That's a Network system versus a "Central Pyramid" which may or may not be his term, I dunno. Network core shift: "Venice, Antwerp, Genoa, Amsterdam, London, New York." Different cultural patterns. Pyramids tend to homogenize, networks tend not to.
"urban patterns do not result from some global optimizer (such as superrational human decision makers minimizing transportation costs) but from a dynamics of cooperation and conflict among cities, involving growth and decay of centers." Yup, people aren't rational actors. There's a good reformulation of this idea in here though: "...the inherent costs of information gathering. Imperfect knowledge, incomplete assessment of feedback, limited memory and recall, as well as poor problem-solving skills result in a form of rationality that attains not optimal decisions but more or less satisfactory compromises between conflicting constraints."
"Many preindustrial cities can be seen as large reservoirs of skills and routines." Sort of like employers in a sense. ...oh and it leads to the guild system!
Capitalism wasn't all supply and demand in the 13th century, there was a lot of noncompetitive behavior for metagaming reasons. Basically this paper is telling me things about how people handle negotiation that I learned in "Competitive Decision Making And Negotiation" which was still the best class.
"As philosophers of science know well, when a theory begins redefining its terms in an ad hoc way to fit the latest round of negative evidence, it shows by this very act that it has reached the limits of its usefulness."
Credit and compound interest as a form of explosive growth that creates power.
Metropolis (Venice) as membrane, exploiting distant resources, capital (Paris) exploits local resources
Page 29 has really interesting stuff on European domination --- China/Islam were poised to do better as of 1500, what about Europe made it come out ahead? Many of the inventions (gunpowder, paper money) came from China, and the credit system came from Islam (a little weird using Islam as a term for a cultural region but I'm paraphrasing here and using the words the essay uses). So being a meshwork prevented Europe from being "too dependent on the individual skills of their elites?" Huh. "An idiot sultan could paralyze the Ottoman Empire in a way that a pope or Holy Roman Emperor could never do for all of Europe." I guess I can buy that. London and Amsterdam were maritime cities, outward focus, therefore in a better position to colonize. Huh. This is a really interesting lens though I'd be skeptical of using it as the only one.
Harnessing wind power in the form of trade winds as a step between plant/solar and oil! FASCINATING.
These are all non-linear models. In conclusion, this paper is badass, although perhaps somewhat limited in trying to fit everything into its approach.
[0] Non Rhode Islanders can follow http://rimag.biz/ALMACS.html
Buildings as a parallel to bone, allowing for movement that wasn't possible for flesh previously. <3 Author points out that cities are not organisms in "A state of internal equilibrium" and it's important to consider them as "dynamical systems operating far from equilibrium."
Birth of Europe made possible by the ability to much more efficiently exploit soil. (I bet there's a parallel here to technological shifts allowing us to much more efficiently exploit oil; earlier de Landa says that we developed cities in the first place because we more efficiently exploited solar power through plant cultivation.) Oh right he mentions that parallel in, like, the next paragraph. Go me.
"Bureaucracies have always arisen to effect a planned extraction of energy surpluses." Bureaucracies as homogenous hierarchies, markets (like a farmer's market not like an Almacs [0]) as heterogeneous. Meshworks versus hierarchies! de Landa: "meshworks and hierarchies not only coexist and intermingle, they constantly give rise to one another. For example, as markets grow in size, they tend to form commercial hierarchies."
On page 12, a bunch of things about how "explosive" change can't happen when hierarchy overwhelms meshwork and that's why Europe was dominant for a millenium. ...really? de Landa holds the authors saying that at a distance, it will be interesting to see wehre he goes with it. Certainly mostly-hierarchical systems and mostly-meshy systems are going to behave somewhat differently...
Money as: energy but in the opposite direction, political rather than economic, a catalyst.
"not only resources change hands in the market but also property rights" has been said twice so I guess I should write it down. I mean, this seems kind of obvious to me?
Difference between looking at totalities and large-scale entities --- looking at cities lets us examine patterns but maintain specificity. Groups of cities can themselves form hierarchical patterns. Cities can also form meshworks. Long-distance trading centers are an example of that. That's a Network system versus a "Central Pyramid" which may or may not be his term, I dunno. Network core shift: "Venice, Antwerp, Genoa, Amsterdam, London, New York." Different cultural patterns. Pyramids tend to homogenize, networks tend not to.
"urban patterns do not result from some global optimizer (such as superrational human decision makers minimizing transportation costs) but from a dynamics of cooperation and conflict among cities, involving growth and decay of centers." Yup, people aren't rational actors. There's a good reformulation of this idea in here though: "...the inherent costs of information gathering. Imperfect knowledge, incomplete assessment of feedback, limited memory and recall, as well as poor problem-solving skills result in a form of rationality that attains not optimal decisions but more or less satisfactory compromises between conflicting constraints."
"Many preindustrial cities can be seen as large reservoirs of skills and routines." Sort of like employers in a sense. ...oh and it leads to the guild system!
Capitalism wasn't all supply and demand in the 13th century, there was a lot of noncompetitive behavior for metagaming reasons. Basically this paper is telling me things about how people handle negotiation that I learned in "Competitive Decision Making And Negotiation" which was still the best class.
"As philosophers of science know well, when a theory begins redefining its terms in an ad hoc way to fit the latest round of negative evidence, it shows by this very act that it has reached the limits of its usefulness."
Credit and compound interest as a form of explosive growth that creates power.
Metropolis (Venice) as membrane, exploiting distant resources, capital (Paris) exploits local resources
Page 29 has really interesting stuff on European domination --- China/Islam were poised to do better as of 1500, what about Europe made it come out ahead? Many of the inventions (gunpowder, paper money) came from China, and the credit system came from Islam (a little weird using Islam as a term for a cultural region but I'm paraphrasing here and using the words the essay uses). So being a meshwork prevented Europe from being "too dependent on the individual skills of their elites?" Huh. "An idiot sultan could paralyze the Ottoman Empire in a way that a pope or Holy Roman Emperor could never do for all of Europe." I guess I can buy that. London and Amsterdam were maritime cities, outward focus, therefore in a better position to colonize. Huh. This is a really interesting lens though I'd be skeptical of using it as the only one.
Harnessing wind power in the form of trade winds as a step between plant/solar and oil! FASCINATING.
These are all non-linear models. In conclusion, this paper is badass, although perhaps somewhat limited in trying to fit everything into its approach.
[0] Non Rhode Islanders can follow http://rimag.biz/ALMACS.html
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Date: 2010-09-15 02:32 am (UTC)