The Well-Tempered City: What Modern Science, Ancient Civilizations, and Human Nature Teach Us About the Future of Urban Life

To address the issues our cities face in the twenty-first century we need both, seeing the world as quantum physics does, understanding that light can be both an individual particle and a collective wave. To thrive and adapt, cities need to enhance both our individual and our collective nature.

Electing a ditch boss, as the role came to be known, is the oldest and longest-running democratic process in the world, and continues to this day in many parts of the world.

To administer its complex domain, Uruk developed more sophisticated counting and recording systems, and the world’s first writing.

The success of Lübeck demonstrates important tools for creating thriving cities that apply to this day. Even in the Digital Age, businesspeople like to get together and gossip, trade, compete, and collaborate.

The Biocomplexity Institute at Indiana University defines biocomplexity as “the study of the emergence of self-organized, complex behaviors from the interaction of many simple agents.

Modern cities operate under an economic theory that is less than 300 years old, and our theory of evolution is less than 150, so we don’t yet fully understand their implications. We have not developed an overarching meh to energize our cities, to permeate them with a worldview that aligns our economic, technological, and social advances with the we

During the Ubaid period, as communities joined the network the generative value of the whole system grew geometrically, a phenomenon described by Metcalf’s law (which was developed to describe the growth of modern communication networks): the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system.

To a volatile world of competing cities, Prince Henry the Lion offers a particularly salient message. He expanded his realm by widely disseminating free copies of his rules for ordering a diverse city. The best ideas for city planning and governance won, providing the tempering system that gave rise to a powerful network.

As it turned out, they didn’t need an emperor to strike the best balance between development and nature: the wisdom of the crowd worked well.