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.

These two cultural practices, the belief in “big gods” and advances in agriculture, evolved hand in hand, and are evident in the foundation of very early cities in history.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

From the beginning the balance between civilization and nature has been essential to meeting both our spiritual and practical needs.

Göbekli Tepe also has several windowless rooms with polished terrazzo floors, and stone benches were placed among the columns for sitting. The carvings on the columns are magnificent and mysterious, and include lions, bulls, boars, foxes, snakes, spiders, and birds, and images of abstract humans and phallic symbols. The site shows no signs of settl