emergent order v1

I heard about Elinor Ostrom the first time last year. And a paper by Ron Eglash only a few months ago. There seems to be an very solid thread tying these two together, along with others like Jane Jacobs, Arturo Escobar, Keller Easterling (very new to me). In most cases, these people were writers and researchers, bringing light to the work of independent communities.

It’s all still quite amorphous, but Organized Chaos—or maybe Emergent Order—sounds like a decent tagline at the moment. So, what is it? Best I’ve got is a string of quotes—to be better digested in the future:

Life and Death of Great American Cities

There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served - Jane Jacobs

Hope in Source #11: City as Liturgy

Pickstock : Descartes :: Jane Jacobs : Urban Planners: Replacing a “living, very sophisticated, rich and subtle order” with “visually flashy and comprehensible, but that was outside of time and therefore dead.”

Organic Order is not meant to be known all at once. It runs a system based on its output. Generating a fractal order - Timothy Patitsis

RadicalxChange Replayed #14: No Normal | Keller Easterling in Conversation with Shumi Bose

The parameters of the system are constantly changing and therefore systems don’t hold… Productive entanglements is the phrase that we’ve been throwing around. - Shumi Bose

Designers tend to find and apply a kind of over arching (top-down) order to the work they do. These seem to fly in the face of that; Elinor Ostrom’s research shows communities coordinating to maintain shared resources without a central authority. Ron Eglash documents the fractal patterns in African architecture. Recurring themes: “Everyone is a designer” but not in the IDEO Design Thinking way (and it’s rarely ever called capital-D Design). The only constant is change.

The New Urbanists are old now, so I’m not sure where this rabbit hole goes for someone making those top-down order things, but it might be useful.

Update [27-10-2023]: I came across this essay on design’s shift away from the problem-solving lens. There’s a lot of interesting history along the way and a wide range of sources for future rabbitholes. It did not have a solution to life, the universe, and everything like I’d expected, but helps address some of the dissonance I’ve felt with design.

Skimmed / Read

Design for the Pluriverse - Arturo Escobar
Life and Death of Great American Cities - Jane Jacobs

Want to read:

Medium Design - Keller Easterling
Order Without Design - Alain Bertaud
The Self-Organizing Universe - Eric Jantsch