Steven Johnson's Emergence
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Steven Johnson's Emergence
by Rebecca Sanborn Stone
Some would call me indecisive, fickle, foolish, or a good candidate for Ritalin, given my tendency to engage in many disciplines at once. Even now, with a masters degree in environmental science, I am plotting an eventual return to school for an MFA, or MBA, or MEd, or perhaps just some PhDs. I prefer to think of myself as a generalist, however, in the great tradition of cockroaches, crabgrass, Leonardo DaVinci and Jesse "The Body" Ventura. Indeed, I love finding connections between elements as seemingly unrelated as spineless arthropods and politicians (though perhaps that’s not the best example), and in turn to connect those connections with important issues and strategies for change.
Given my penchant for unusual logic, it was a no-brainer to revisit Steven Johnson’s Emergence: the connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software, published by Scribner Press in 2001. These organisms and objects do indeed have connected lives and relate as well to planning, community development, and citizen participation. The main connection, as the title suggests, is the concept of emergence, which Johnson defines as "what happens when you have a system of relatively simple-minded component parts—often there are thousands or millions of them—and they interact in relatively simple ways. And yet somehow out of all this interaction some higher level structure or intelligence appears, usually without any master planner calling the shots."
Ants create colonies that thrive by taking on specialized tasks, though there is no top-down control or even pre-programmed genetic instruction on how to do so. The Internet has grown to include millions of independent sites and connections without any grand plan for development and management. Slime mold cells aimlessly slither across the forest floor until they all suddenly, inexplicably join together and form one superorganism. The millions, perhaps billions of species on earth continue to evolve and specialize—one generation, one organism, one cell, or even one protein at a time. The phenomenon of emergence is as old as the universe itself and as young as each new website, instance of mitosis, or human decision. As much as humans like to hold themselves above the laws of physics and nature, urban development and other sophisticated endeavors are a matter of emergence as well. “While actual cities are heavily shaped by top-down forces, such as zoning laws and planning commissions,” Johnson writes, “scholars have long recognized that bottom-up forces play a critical role in city formation, creating distinct neighborhoods and other unplanned demographic clusters… Like any emergent system, a city is a pattern in time.”
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In a sense, this theory bodes poorly for the planning field; we’ve worried for years that human skills and interactions may become obsolete with a rise in digital technology and robotics, but perhaps we will instead be replaced by a simple and ancient concept. If cities will self-construct, evolve, learn, and replicate without any help from master plans, government officials, zoning regulations and licensed planners (the horror!), then what good are visioning documents, charrettes, ballot initiatives, and public meetings? Resistance is futile, according to the wisdom of emergence and Star Trek, but could our tinkering go so far as to harm the development of communities we care so much about?
It is indeed unlikely that we can excuse ourselves from a phenomenon shaping the universe and everything in it. We can use emergence to our advantage, however, if we act a little less like planners and more like 19th Century Augustinian monks. Gregor Mendel spent hours examining pea plants in his garden and eventually came to realize that we are all products of natural selection. Rather than attempting to subvert the process, Mendel (and generations to follow) instead adopted it and adjusted it to further their own purposes. Artificial selection first gave us sheep with extra wool, then hardy varieties of corn and wheat, and now fruit programmed to ripen and blush in coordination with shipping schedules.
Johnson does not go into great depth on applications of emergence or the scientific and technical details behind it, but with a little creativity and commitment to systems thinking, we could begin to develop “artifical emergence” for the planning and citizen participation fields as web and software developers have done. Johnson says at the close of the book, “understanding emergence has always been about giving up control, letting the system govern itself as much as possible, letting it learn from the footprints.” If we can draw connections between the eBay community and our home towns, for example, we might develop a “community feedback” system to mirror the online “user feedback” system, which nearly-effortlessly improves the quality and consistency of eBay. If we can learn to see the similarities between ants and humans, we might find a way for cities to run and operate without the bureaucracy and top-down controls that dominate planning and management today. If we can stomach the idea that we are linked to slime mold, we might all learn to come together as well as the primitive cells that emerge as one from underneath our feet.
If you are intrigued, you can learn more about the topic and comment yourself on Wikipedia.org, where an unconnected group of users read, write, and argue their way to single encyclopedia-style articles—one of the best examples of emergence around. One article covers the intricacies and history of emergence.