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

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.

“This is the earliest complex society in the world. If you want to understand the roots of the urban revolution, you have to look at the Ubaid.”

That response reflects a larger general issue faced by all city leaders: the temptation to maximize benefit for an individual district, department, or company versus optimizing the whole system. From an evolutionary point of view an individual might do better in the short term by maximizing its own gains, but over the long run it will benefit more

The goal of this book is to knit these threads—our technical and social potential and the generative power of nature—back together, toward a higher purpose for cities.

New Haven’s efforts to replace old neighborhoods with brutally modern architecture received national attention, and won many design awards, but by the late 1960s they had largely failed because they concentrated poverty, isolated residents

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.

Connectivity, culture, coherence, community, and compassion are the protective factors of civilized cities.

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.

When the various individual agents in a system interact, they begin to self-organize into something larger, a community whose collective behavior allows it to function cohesively.