I think you should’ve brought up superorganisms in your video, they are a unit of highly specialized social animals such as ants and bees which act as if they were a single organism. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superorganism
Wouldn’t fungi be a better organism to compare a city to than a mammal? Fungi can be multi-nodal and grow based on surrounding resources, rather than a genetic game plan?
@@futbolind a group of developers and planner with some resources and workforce, i guess but i prefer to compare cities with plants in some aspects (i`m a researcher of plant`s genetics, natural bias)
My first thought for a different model organism would be one without a centralized nervous system. This video seems to have a mammal-centric bias, but if you don't wanna extend beyond the animal kingdom (re: classifications) you could look at echinoderms (eg starfish, sea urchins). Their circulatory systems are based on their water-vascular system and does not have a central node. Further, a better comparison for mammalian circulation in cities could be their mass transit, which usually does have a central node.
Just because you don't have a 1-to-1 match of systems between cities and vertebrates doesn't mean that the metaphor doesn't hold. Cities are an organism unlike any other organism that exists. Some multicellular organisms don't have circulatory systems (jellyfish). Some organisms have a distributed brain (octopuses). Some organisms can have multiple centers or no clear boundary (funguses). The similarity between cities and organisms is that they have similar problems to solve - the demands of obtaining and distributing resources, growing, eliminating waste, etc. Those problems can be solved in all kinds of different ways depending on the needs and history of the organism, and the unique demands of a city leads to unique solutions to those problems.
I agree that organisms are quite varied, but I think when you say that "cities are an organism unlike any other organism that exists" you hit the nail on the head. If no such organism already exists, cities aren't really organisms. They are incredibly complex systems, however.
@@CityBeautiful if something behaves like what organisms should it's a organism, the difference you underlined about circulatory systems is based on the fact that nutrients don't have propulsion like cars/people on the street so a centralised system acts better for vertebrates than cities, also it's kind of centralised as you generally go from less capacity lanes to the more capacity ones to move, generally in the public transport.
@@CityBeautiful Stupid and narrow minded. So the first eucariot was not really an organism because no other such organism existed. The first multicellular organism was not really an organism because no such thing already existed and so on..
I am so glad youtube came along an gave nerds all this power, so they can rise above anonymity, mockery and bullying and just rule the influencer world, if you doubt my words just read this line "is it saskatoon or a rackoon"
Diego, no pensé que te encontráis en comentario de videos de Urbanismo. Si estaría padre que comuniques esta información en en tu canal en español, y por tu tamaño incluso puede ser una colaboración con city beautifull
Just a quick note, I don't believe metaphors are supposed to be perfect; a perfect metaphor would largely just be a description. The point of the metaphor, as I see it, is to be limited, because it's point is to draw forth similarities, which otherwise might go unnoticed, not describe.
I’m pretty sure you could also compare cities to a human anatomy, like NYC with Times Square as the heart and the Subway as the blood stream Which in retrospect is the same analogy I guess
Cities have Symbiotic relationships with one another, so you could use something from the sea. Also you could say Cities are sorta like Computers aka Motherboards with different components, like different buildings.
The idea of the "body politic" goes back both in oriental and occidental culture for millennia. Oh, Plato... As you point out, the metaphor is imperfect, esp. regarding the rigors of civil engineering. This, however can be a thought experiment to get "outside the box" using natural models from evolved biological efficiencies we see in organisms to suggest new models for urban planning. I don't like having to take DC's red line from NW to the "heart" of the city to get to NE.
Regional planner here that was originally educated in biology ( I also double minored in chemistry and mathematics). I view communities like organisms but not like a circulatory system or nervous system - those systems are restricted to a certain type of function overall. Each city has its node and the people/communities communicate with each other in a manner that reminds me of quorum sensing or antibody-antigen reactions.
Similar to how corporations are similar to an organism. I’m doing a final relating a corporation to the organism of a tree. And how trees rely on other organisms and such. How they network with fungi as a communication network as well as food network that can spread resources over vast distances to trees asking for more resources, etc. Pretty interesting stuff
Whenever you get the chance to watch Fitz Lang's Metropolis make sure to tune out the movies music and listen to Jeff Mills' Metropolis. It's just perfect!
an organism is a cooperating system of a lot of units whose survival is intertwined with one another, cooperating. to the extent that the different agents in a city all share an interest in the city functioning well, growing, being clean, maybe there are some parallels
Although roads, pipes and communication lines don't hook up to a central poit for distribution, this is because stuff generally isn't coming in one way in a city and there's no central distribution point. It might be closer to look at a city as an inside out circulatory system? Or digestive system? Where there aren't any giant hands feeding everything into a central organised system but the system has to do it itself more like a tree with roots...
Actually the local street grid acts much like the capillaries that the veins and arteries lead to and from that distribute materials within the tissues (blocks). Two way roads act as both veins and arteries and the local grid runs into collectors which run into more major arteries so the only real difference is a body is centralized and a city is decentralized.
City Beautiful Because Baltimore was one of the original cities of the 13 colonies. It’s where the Francis Scott Key wrote the Star Spangled Banner at Fort McHenry. The British burned the city down in the War of 1812 on their march to DC. Edgar Allen Poe resided here. There was “White Flight” in the 60’s and 70’s where majority of the white population moved out of the city and into the surrounding counties mainly Baltimore County and it can be said that caused the demise of the city. Baltimore is a port city due to the Chesapeake Bay which is one of the largest bays in North America. There’s the B&O railroad. So much to talk about!!!
@@CityBeautiful I'm bron & raised in Baltimore. There is so much to discuss and question as the city rose & fell in a matter of two decades. The history outweighs even that of New York in more ways than one and being in a "government centric" state like Maryland, B-more manages to fall under the cracks. You'll have a field day, probably end up making a 30 minute long video with all the sources to discuss
Thanks for the great content. Considering a city as a living entity is not just an analogy, I guess. It's interesting to compare the physical features of a city with the body of an animal, but a city also represents a sort of collective consciousness and autonomy. You have surely come across Saskia Sassen's ideas on how the city responds to the changes as an autonomous entity that has its own social and psychological life and character (to some extent) regardless of its form and physical infrastructure. This is the main source that makes a city resilient.
There is a useful analogue for streets and the circulatory system. Streets are capillaries and roads are veins and arteries. A vein always leads to capillaries, never directly to an end destination. In theory roads and streets work the same way, but in practice there are stroads
one of my favorite books. i'd also recommend the first half of "a systems view of life" by fritjof capra. if you want more on similar complex systems, chaos theory, mandelbrot stuff.
5 ¢ as a biologist: while I do agree with the overall point in that section you're making, many organisms do have quite a lot of periphery to periphery connections without a central node. Besides the more obvious examples of fungi and plants, the endocrine system is pretty distributed, while lower organisms (and with some stretch us too) have localized nervous response that doesn't need a central brain. Molluscs doubled down on both actually and have a decentralized nervous system where "the brain" is a collection of nodes spread all over.
I wish I would've came up with a city + animal rhyme! These were good! And this video is a little different from what your normally do (I guess to me because of the biology aspect) but it's SO good!
Cities also used to be dirty, ugly and unpleasant places to live in during the industrial revolution. Many things they had in common with those old machines. Nowadays since cities are clean and almost(!) everyone wants to live in one, we can create metaphors as pleasant as organisms. That metaphor also implies we should take good care of our cities, while you can let most old machines rust in the dust.
I think when it comes to looking at cities in relation to organisms, it’s interesting to compare cities to monocellular level life rather than larger multicellular organisms By that I mean a city is fairly analogous to a cell in the sense that it has multiple organelles which serve specific purposes (such as your energy centres, processing areas and storage nodes), but these aren’t all located in a singular determined set of positions as seen with organs in larger forms of life like animals and fungi, in a spatial sense the internals of a cell are vastly more fluid, just as while two cities may look fairly similar from above their layouts and spatial patterns can be drastically different on the inside There’s also the idea of permeability; the accessibility of city borders can be better compared to the permeable membrane of a cell, as entry and exit can be highly varied and ever changing with internal and external shifts in influence (which larger circulatory and respiratory systems cannot do). On another note is the concept of cellular division: Cells divide and replicate to both grow & replace worn out cells, and in regards to stem cells, these can become more heavily adapted for certain purposes and roles - compare to how cities grow through the expansion of many smaller units to form a greater whole, while also internally dividing into neighbourhoods, districts and boroughs, and developing areas with distinct characters, spatial & socioeconomic land uses, among many other things. I always thought of it as an unusual perspective on cities, but always entertaining to think about!
Mankind is more than just an economic agent. He/she is a creative individual that is trying to establish a meaningful legacy for the self and their offspring before he/she dies. The individual forms the smallest institutional unit (the family). Cities develop as corporation and government institutions are formed to efficiently serve each other, rather than the individual. As such, the family institution plays second fiddle to the corporation and the government institution. Le Corbusier's vision of the perfect city is a nigthmarish example of this corporate/government co-dependence where the individual has been reduced to living in a rabbit hutch and reliant on artificial dopamine pleasures in order to adapt to this environment. Thank God, the French government did not take him up on the notion to raze 1/3 of Paris to realize his vision. Unfortunately, Iron curtain Europe swallowed his ideas hook, line, and sinker. Large cities do have their place, but not without the small town alternative. It needs to be remembered, that many of the greatest inventions were produced outside of the big city. I do enjoy your research, but the needs of small towns need to be addressed. This is why we have Trump, Brexit, and the Yellow vest movement.
My argument against hypothesis is that any part of the city can survive on its own unlike a cell or organ of a living organism(unless special conditions are provided.)
That's an interesting point! Though certainly a part of a city without the whole would be worse off. And in the book "Scale" (which this video is based on) it talks about one big difference between cities and organisms -- cities don't usually die.
@@CityBeautiful agreed. Also immorality is one of the hallmarks of cancer cells. With the way some of the cities grow in my country (India) with wanton disregard for nature, they're like cancer.
"Organisms don't really have an equivalent of a grid system". 5:16 that is utterly incorrect. The cytoskeleton is what you're looking for. It is not so hard to see how cities are alive, although differently alive. They must combat the same laws of nature and will come up with similar efficient solutions. Cities are an kind of evolutionary transition for humans, just as single-celled organism became multicellular. There are major differences, but we're talking about different length scales, which requires different solutions.
You might like the book “Scale. The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies” by Geoffrey West which goes into the maths
Similarities between seemingly unrelated things are very common, and this isn't a coincidence. There aren't that many ways that things can happen mathematically. That's why it is useful to make these comparisons - because the mathematical/conceptual tools for dealing with one situation, might already exist in a completely different context. Anyway, I think cities are, and grow a lot more like plants than animals. Moreover, the pruning of plants has a lot of similarities with city planning, especially the pruning of fruit trees. Unpruned trees, become overgrown messy thickets, just like unplanned cities. Branches become diseased and interfere with each other. These trees bear excessive amounts of fruit that is too small and poor quality. Improperly pruned trees can develop unhealthily exaggerated features, just like poorly planned cities. If a tree does become too big to remain healthy, you can prune it back, and it will thrive again, just like cities that are contracting. Pruning trees is also said to be a conversation, because you can't see how a tree will grow in the future. You don't know which branches will dominate, or where new growth will bud. You don't know how a tree will respond to your pruning. All you can do is follow the right principles in pruning, and wait for the tree to respond and respond to the tree and so on. I think city planners could learn a lot from this. The very word planner implies some supernatural abilities for their planning policies to have the intended outcome, which is wishful thinking. But that is the think I like about your channel. You talk about what planning principles make heathy cities.
5:10 .....and?? Even if in the analogy a city would have multiple hearts, the comparison still stands. Insects have multiple "hearts" pumping hemolymph around an open circulatory system that doesn't loop (like a city), and really big dinosaurs are thought to have had multiple hearts as well. The bigger the city, the more hearts/nodes it's likely to have too, right? A small town would only have it's one city centre, but take a capital city map and you'll find several nexus throughout. Also, the same areas ARE reached by multiple routes as well in circulatory systems - even when you cut your finger and many blood vessels are severed, blood will still reach the entirety of your finger trough "alternate routes." Since cities are planned and thought out, we can develop extra effective ways to its circulation routes than nature's random-changes-and-if-it-works-it-works-i-guess natural selection system can spontaneously do, and that's were things like redundancy and efficiency in it's planning/layout will show up, but still...
Kristiano Bertucci I am not sure but I would assume it is to do with the proximity to everything you need. In the area where my Grandparents live in Łodz, they have access to supermarkets, markets and other things which they need within a 15 minute walk. However, for the longer journeys into the town centre, there are sufficient tram networks found in many Eastern Bloc cities which is able to supply the people going on longer journeys which aren't needed as much.
I think that it does differ between cities and the way they grow too. Remember that many biological forms have radiated from a common ancestor, only to have many go extinct and successful organisms remain. I think there is something to be considered with geometry, biology and maths can be applied to both organisms and cities.
Hey City Beautiful, what article did you read referring to cities as a gas, liquid or crystal when it comes to the UHI? I am currently in the process of making a video about UHI and would love to read it if you could give me the name of the paper.
Would a future in which self-driving cars drive on continuous roads better mirror blood cells traveling through veins/arteries if the cars went to a central refueling location, such as a core charging station or gas pumping station?
Nice shout out to Saskatoon! Curious what you think about our current dilemma. A few people really want bike Lanes, but our bikable climate isn't much more than six months per year for average cyclists. A lot of voices seem to be saying this is a poor use of infrastructure and little more than pandering to a small subset of the voting public. Any thoughts? As a long time Sim City dabbler, Love your channel!!
I like your analysis here, but you do seem a bit defensive about the organism analogy. No metaphor is perfect, including the one comparing cities to organisms. I understand that as a city planner, you prefer not to admit it, but I do think organism is the best analogy out there to cities. Good video.
Have you considered that cities are like rhizome organisms (E.g. ginger) and not animal organisms? Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus might be a good read for you
I don't think cities are organisms because the individual parts of a city don't need the city to stay alive. If you remove a wolf from its pack it will continue living and could join another pack, we don't consider the wolf pack a large organism. The same way if we remove a person from a city, you could even move a building (like moving a mobile park home). But in a organisms if you remove a part of it, it will ether die unless its reproducing. I feel like the connection between parts of a city are too loose for it to be considered alive. Their are animals who do reproduce by splitting themselves, but once they do that they cant undo that. But going back to the wolf pack, a wolf can rejoin a pack. The same way a person could move back into the city.
Every so called "scientist" that does not see that the universe is a living thing is just a mechanic. His mind can only process the obvious parts of life before his eyes. Everything is alive. Life does not end at the other side of a cell's membrane. A city is an organism too. There is no isolated system in the universe. It's systems within systems, overlapping each other. God is life itself. Everything in life is connected. We are part of a greater being. Religions are just different languages, they are an attempt to communicate this insight to other humans. With science getting more and more of the picture (macrocosm, microcosm), and people getting educated about it, it will be easier and easier for everyone to understand it. For that:☮️, you have to see this:☯️.
![Stroads are Ugly, Expensive, and Dangerous (and they're everywhere) [ST05]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ORzNZUeUHAM/mqdefault.jpg)
How else are cities like organisms? Any other similarities?
City Beautiful They have “souls” that are vaguely organized like themselves. Plato was the first philosopher to make this comparison in Republic.
Octopi,,,transportation lines,,hubs,,tentacles
Great video
Cities more like ecosystems, not organisms
I think you should’ve brought up superorganisms in your video, they are a unit of highly specialized social animals such as ants and bees which act as if they were a single organism.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superorganism
Greasher That might be the most useful comparison
I can't believe you didn't say "Buffalo or buffalo?"
Or Red Deer and Moosejaw.
Wouldn’t fungi be a better organism to compare a city to than a mammal? Fungi can be multi-nodal and grow based on surrounding resources, rather than a genetic game plan?
Frankie Bedek What about cancer? It metastasizes and humans are slowly but surely killing the planet.
But even fungi are just mindless growers without any set plan.
What do you think is an analogue of fungal spore for cities?
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." - Edward Abbey
@@futbolind a group of developers and planner with some resources and workforce, i guess
but i prefer to compare cities with plants in some aspects (i`m a researcher of plant`s genetics, natural bias)
My first thought for a different model organism would be one without a centralized nervous system. This video seems to have a mammal-centric bias, but if you don't wanna extend beyond the animal kingdom (re: classifications) you could look at echinoderms (eg starfish, sea urchins). Their circulatory systems are based on their water-vascular system and does not have a central node.
Further, a better comparison for mammalian circulation in cities could be their mass transit, which usually does have a central node.
Just because you don't have a 1-to-1 match of systems between cities and vertebrates doesn't mean that the metaphor doesn't hold. Cities are an organism unlike any other organism that exists. Some multicellular organisms don't have circulatory systems (jellyfish). Some organisms have a distributed brain (octopuses). Some organisms can have multiple centers or no clear boundary (funguses). The similarity between cities and organisms is that they have similar problems to solve - the demands of obtaining and distributing resources, growing, eliminating waste, etc. Those problems can be solved in all kinds of different ways depending on the needs and history of the organism, and the unique demands of a city leads to unique solutions to those problems.
I agree that organisms are quite varied, but I think when you say that "cities are an organism unlike any other organism that exists" you hit the nail on the head. If no such organism already exists, cities aren't really organisms. They are incredibly complex systems, however.
@@CityBeautiful if something behaves like what organisms should it's a organism, the difference you underlined about circulatory systems is based on the fact that nutrients don't have propulsion like cars/people on the street so a centralised system acts better for vertebrates than cities, also it's kind of centralised as you generally go from less capacity lanes to the more capacity ones to move, generally in the public transport.
@@CityBeautiful Stupid and narrow minded. So the first eucariot was not really an organism because no other such organism existed. The first multicellular organism was not really an organism because no such thing already existed and so on..
"cities consumed raw materials like timber, ore and sheep" love it
@MetraMan09 he definitely said sheep, and sheep (or wool rather) is a resource in settlers of Catan
@MetraMan09 you're very right, I thought you meant that he didn't say "sheep" in the video
Settlers of Catan is a great game.
I am so glad youtube came along an gave nerds all this power, so they can rise above anonymity, mockery and bullying and just rule the influencer world, if you doubt my words just read this line
"is it saskatoon or a rackoon"
Diego, no pensé que te encontráis en comentario de videos de Urbanismo. Si estaría padre que comuniques esta información en en tu canal en español, y por tu tamaño incluso puede ser una colaboración con city beautifull
Just a quick note, I don't believe metaphors are supposed to be perfect; a perfect metaphor would largely just be a description.
The point of the metaphor, as I see it, is to be limited, because it's point is to draw forth similarities, which otherwise might go unnoticed, not describe.
I clicked through hoping he would say "No" and then the rest of the video would be 9 minutes of silence.
haha, well, at least you guessed the conclusion.
@@CityBeautiful love the channel!
yup, that's what I said
@Tattle Boad oh my god you're right
Good day from Saskatoon, I’ve been enjoying the City Beautiful videos for a while now. Keep up the great work.
I'm from sask. It almost seems that we are overrepresented for our population.
Twin Cities!!! Love that I get to see my home state in a video.
Twin Cities or Twin People?
2:01 I broke my ankles just watching that heel strike
Really great Introduction into the topic.
I’m pretty sure you could also compare cities to a human anatomy, like NYC with Times Square as the heart and the Subway as the blood stream
Which in retrospect is the same analogy I guess
Cities have Symbiotic relationships with one another, so you could use something from the sea. Also you could say Cities are sorta like Computers aka Motherboards with different components, like different buildings.
I've not heard many people used the "cities as environments" metaphor, and I'd love to hear more on it
Great Video!! We are big fans of the channel. Thanks for subscribing!
Love this channels!
Tijuana and iguana only have three syllables, tee-hwaa-nah
love your videos, keep up the great work!!
best donkey shows at tijuana
Love this video! You’re on my favorite channel!!!
Thanks!
The idea of the "body politic" goes back both in oriental and occidental culture for millennia. Oh, Plato...
As you point out, the metaphor is imperfect, esp. regarding the rigors of civil engineering. This, however can be a thought experiment to get "outside the box" using natural models from evolved biological efficiencies we see in organisms to suggest new models for urban planning.
I don't like having to take DC's red line from NW to the "heart" of the city to get to NE.
Regional planner here that was originally educated in biology ( I also double minored in chemistry and mathematics). I view communities like organisms but not like a circulatory system or nervous system - those systems are restricted to a certain type of function overall. Each city has its node and the people/communities communicate with each other in a manner that reminds me of quorum sensing or antibody-antigen reactions.
Beautiful cities like Paris, London, Beijing, Tokyo, New York, etc all grew like a human. Started of small, but grew larger on the way.
Similar to how corporations are similar to an organism. I’m doing a final relating a corporation to the organism of a tree. And how trees rely on other organisms and such. How they network with fungi as a communication network as well as food network that can spread resources over vast distances to trees asking for more resources, etc.
Pretty interesting stuff
Whenever you get the chance to watch Fitz Lang's Metropolis make sure to tune out the movies music and listen to Jeff Mills' Metropolis. It's just perfect!
an organism is a cooperating system of a lot of units whose survival is intertwined with one another, cooperating. to the extent that the different agents in a city all share an interest in the city functioning well, growing, being clean, maybe there are some parallels
Although roads, pipes and communication lines don't hook up to a central poit for distribution, this is because stuff generally isn't coming in one way in a city and there's no central distribution point. It might be closer to look at a city as an inside out circulatory system? Or digestive system? Where there aren't any giant hands feeding everything into a central organised system but the system has to do it itself more like a tree with roots...
Woohoo, so cool to hear my cities name in another video, thanks for the rhyme choice :3
Actually the local street grid acts much like the capillaries that the veins and arteries lead to and from that distribute materials within the tissues (blocks). Two way roads act as both veins and arteries and the local grid runs into collectors which run into more major arteries so the only real difference is a body is centralized and a city is decentralized.
I think our comparisons are made from the need to compare A with B... not necessarily that the two are actually fully comparable.
Thanks for making my lunches more interesting!
1:58 don't ever run like that. Your knees will thank you later.
Always interesting videos. Thanks!
Please do a video on Baltimore City, Maryland USA!!!
Have you asked about this before? I feel like I get lots of comments asking about a video on Baltimore, and I can't figure out why.
City Beautiful Because Baltimore was one of the original cities of the 13 colonies. It’s where the Francis Scott Key wrote the Star Spangled Banner at Fort McHenry. The British burned the city down in the War of 1812 on their march to DC. Edgar Allen Poe resided here. There was “White Flight” in the 60’s and 70’s where majority of the white population moved out of the city and into the surrounding counties mainly Baltimore County and it can be said that caused the demise of the city. Baltimore is a port city due to the Chesapeake Bay which is one of the largest bays in North America. There’s the B&O railroad. So much to talk about!!!
@@CityBeautiful I'm bron & raised in Baltimore. There is so much to discuss and question as the city rose & fell in a matter of two decades. The history outweighs even that of New York in more ways than one and being in a "government centric" state like Maryland, B-more manages to fall under the cracks.
You'll have a field day, probably end up making a 30 minute long video with all the sources to discuss
Well if I happen to be in Baltimore (sounds cool!) I'll definitely do a video about it.
I feel like City Beautiful had a lot more city/animal references and struggled to cut it down to four in the beginning. Lol.
I actually solicited ideas on Twitter, and you're right, I really had a hard time choosing!
Thanks for the great content. Considering a city as a living entity is not just an analogy, I guess. It's interesting to compare the physical features of a city with the body of an animal, but a city also represents a sort of collective consciousness and autonomy. You have surely come across Saskia Sassen's ideas on how the city responds to the changes as an autonomous entity that has its own social and psychological life and character (to some extent) regardless of its form and physical infrastructure. This is the main source that makes a city resilient.
There is a useful analogue for streets and the circulatory system. Streets are capillaries and roads are veins and arteries. A vein always leads to capillaries, never directly to an end destination. In theory roads and streets work the same way, but in practice there are stroads
one of my favorite books. i'd also recommend the first half of "a systems view of life" by fritjof capra. if you want more on similar complex systems, chaos theory, mandelbrot stuff.
*Now* I see what those tweets about city and animal names was all about.
5 ¢ as a biologist: while I do agree with the overall point in that section you're making, many organisms do have quite a lot of periphery to periphery connections without a central node. Besides the more obvious examples of fungi and plants, the endocrine system is pretty distributed, while lower organisms (and with some stretch us too) have localized nervous response that doesn't need a central brain. Molluscs doubled down on both actually and have a decentralized nervous system where "the brain" is a collection of nodes spread all over.
I wish I would've came up with a city + animal rhyme! These were good!
And this video is a little different from what your normally do (I guess to me because of the biology aspect) but it's SO good!
Hey you have a LEGO Architecture Chicago in the back! really cool!
Cities also used to be dirty, ugly and unpleasant places to live in during the industrial revolution. Many things they had in common with those old machines. Nowadays since cities are clean and almost(!) everyone wants to live in one, we can create metaphors as pleasant as organisms. That metaphor also implies we should take good care of our cities, while you can let most old machines rust in the dust.
Your videos are awesome. Thank you.
I think when it comes to looking at cities in relation to organisms, it’s interesting to compare cities to monocellular level life rather than larger multicellular organisms
By that I mean a city is fairly analogous to a cell in the sense that it has multiple organelles which serve specific purposes (such as your energy centres, processing areas and storage nodes), but these aren’t all located in a singular determined set of positions as seen with organs in larger forms of life like animals and fungi, in a spatial sense the internals of a cell are vastly more fluid, just as while two cities may look fairly similar from above their layouts and spatial patterns can be drastically different on the inside
There’s also the idea of permeability; the accessibility of city borders can be better compared to the permeable membrane of a cell, as entry and exit can be highly varied and ever changing with internal and external shifts in influence (which larger circulatory and respiratory systems cannot do).
On another note is the concept of cellular division: Cells divide and replicate to both grow & replace worn out cells, and in regards to stem cells, these can become more heavily adapted for certain purposes and roles - compare to how cities grow through the expansion of many smaller units to form a greater whole, while also internally dividing into neighbourhoods, districts and boroughs, and developing areas with distinct characters, spatial & socioeconomic land uses, among many other things.
I always thought of it as an unusual perspective on cities, but always entertaining to think about!
Per usual great work!!!
Mankind is more than just an economic agent. He/she is a creative individual that is trying to establish a meaningful legacy for the self and their offspring before he/she dies. The individual forms the smallest institutional unit (the family). Cities develop as corporation and government institutions are formed to efficiently serve each other, rather than the individual. As such, the family institution plays second fiddle to the corporation and the government institution. Le Corbusier's vision of the perfect city is a nigthmarish example of this corporate/government co-dependence where the individual has been reduced to living in a rabbit hutch and reliant on artificial dopamine pleasures in order to adapt to this environment. Thank God, the French government did not take him up on the notion to raze 1/3 of Paris to realize his vision. Unfortunately, Iron curtain Europe swallowed his ideas hook, line, and sinker. Large cities do have their place, but not without the small town alternative. It needs to be remembered, that many of the greatest inventions were produced outside of the big city.
I do enjoy your research, but the needs of small towns need to be addressed. This is why we have Trump, Brexit, and the Yellow vest movement.
"Dubai or fly" clearly was enough and this absolute madman went on
Nice Lego Chicago skyline👌
My argument against hypothesis is that any part of the city can survive on its own unlike a cell or organ of a living organism(unless special conditions are provided.)
That's an interesting point! Though certainly a part of a city without the whole would be worse off. And in the book "Scale" (which this video is based on) it talks about one big difference between cities and organisms -- cities don't usually die.
@@CityBeautiful agreed.
Also immorality is one of the hallmarks of cancer cells. With the way some of the cities grow in my country (India) with wanton disregard for nature, they're like cancer.
"Organisms don't really have an equivalent of a grid system". 5:16 that is utterly incorrect. The cytoskeleton is what you're looking for. It is not so hard to see how cities are alive, although differently alive. They must combat the same laws of nature and will come up with similar efficient solutions. Cities are an kind of evolutionary transition for humans, just as single-celled organism became multicellular. There are major differences, but we're talking about different length scales, which requires different solutions.
the value of this work is in discovering whether there is new maths to be found here. it's all about the maths
You might like the book “Scale. The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies” by Geoffrey West which goes into the maths
I like the set!
Thanks! I'll keep improving it, but it's better than the previous blank white wall.
BOI IM FROM GREEN BAY IM SO PROUD
920! 920! (I'm from Door County originally)
Similarities between seemingly unrelated things are very common, and this isn't a coincidence. There aren't that many ways that things can happen mathematically. That's why it is useful to make these comparisons - because the mathematical/conceptual tools for dealing with one situation, might already exist in a completely different context.
Anyway, I think cities are, and grow a lot more like plants than animals. Moreover, the pruning of plants has a lot of similarities with city planning, especially the pruning of fruit trees.
Unpruned trees, become overgrown messy thickets, just like unplanned cities. Branches become diseased and interfere with each other. These trees bear excessive amounts of fruit that is too small and poor quality. Improperly pruned trees can develop unhealthily exaggerated features, just like poorly planned cities. If a tree does become too big to remain healthy, you can prune it back, and it will thrive again, just like cities that are contracting.
Pruning trees is also said to be a conversation, because you can't see how a tree will grow in the future. You don't know which branches will dominate, or where new growth will bud. You don't know how a tree will respond to your pruning. All you can do is follow the right principles in pruning, and wait for the tree to respond and respond to the tree and so on.
I think city planners could learn a lot from this. The very word planner implies some supernatural abilities for their planning policies to have the intended outcome, which is wishful thinking.
But that is the think I like about your channel. You talk about what planning principles make heathy cities.
Well make the video longer if need be because your videos are that awesome
Great video! I love Catan!
5:10 .....and?? Even if in the analogy a city would have multiple hearts, the comparison still stands. Insects have multiple "hearts" pumping hemolymph around an open circulatory system that doesn't loop (like a city), and really big dinosaurs are thought to have had multiple hearts as well. The bigger the city, the more hearts/nodes it's likely to have too, right? A small town would only have it's one city centre, but take a capital city map and you'll find several nexus throughout.
Also, the same areas ARE reached by multiple routes as well in circulatory systems - even when you cut your finger and many blood vessels are severed, blood will still reach the entirety of your finger trough "alternate routes."
Since cities are planned and thought out, we can develop extra effective ways to its circulation routes than nature's random-changes-and-if-it-works-it-works-i-guess natural selection system can spontaneously do, and that's were things like redundancy and efficiency in it's planning/layout will show up, but still...
Beautiful videos... thank you so much... ill donate you guys soon
This is from Newman and Kenworthy, from 1989
Why apartment towers worked in Eastern Europe? Could you make video about it?
It basically works in every medium wealthy socialist country, as it also works in China and Vietnam.
Kristiano Bertucci I am not sure but I would assume it is to do with the proximity to everything you need. In the area where my Grandparents live in Łodz, they have access to supermarkets, markets and other things which they need within a 15 minute walk. However, for the longer journeys into the town centre, there are sufficient tram networks found in many Eastern Bloc cities which is able to supply the people going on longer journeys which aren't needed as much.
Please make a video explaining how Seattle can be such a horrendously antisocial and depressing city despite appearing so normal on the surface.
What do I look like, a psychologist?
@@CityBeautiful lel
As a lifetime resident of Green Bay, heck yes.
Biology is to urban studies as quatum field theory is to general relativity.
Yep.
7:20 - I saw my house!
Clearly it must means cities should work with centralized hubs as hearts and one-way street only as roads
Hmmm I always thought they were more like living things but I guess organisms works as well.
Not all organisms possess centralized circulatory systems considering cities like fungal colonies might be more apt.
Ayyyy reppin my towm of milwaukee
I think that it does differ between cities and the way they grow too. Remember that many biological forms have radiated from a common ancestor, only to have many go extinct and successful organisms remain. I think there is something to be considered with geometry, biology and maths can be applied to both organisms and cities.
Hey City Beautiful, what article did you read referring to cities as a gas, liquid or crystal when it comes to the UHI? I am currently in the process of making a video about UHI and would love to read it if you could give me the name of the paper.
The city as a cell!
We've been coming cities for a long time...
Cities are like villages but bigger.
Well if ant clonies count as superorganisms then cities (basically human colonies) also count as superorganisms
you should do a video on subways, what goes on down there in the tunnels. how does it work?
how do they not crash into each other? or are they always like freeways and never cross tracks?
also do a video on this, I couldn't make it nice looking though. forum.skyscraperpage.com/showpost.php?p=8573994&postcount=48
That's a good topic -- I think there might even be videos on this already if you search UA-cam.
I read it as "Are cities Orgasms" lol
same.
SAAMMEE
Aw yes, Detroit! My favourite type of Orgasm
Yes. Yes they are.
Would a future in which self-driving cars drive on continuous roads better mirror blood cells traveling through veins/arteries if the cars went to a central refueling location, such as a core charging station or gas pumping station?
Nice shout out to Saskatoon! Curious what you think about our current dilemma. A few people really want bike Lanes, but our bikable climate isn't much more than six months per year for average cyclists. A lot of voices seem to be saying this is a poor use of infrastructure and little more than pandering to a small subset of the voting public. Any thoughts? As a long time Sim City dabbler, Love your channel!!
I like your analysis here, but you do seem a bit defensive about the organism analogy. No metaphor is perfect, including the one comparing cities to organisms. I understand that as a city planner, you prefer not to admit it, but I do think organism is the best analogy out there to cities. Good video.
You should read Alaine Bertaud's Order Without Design and do a video on that.
Have you considered that cities are like rhizome organisms (E.g. ginger) and not animal organisms? Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus might be a good read for you
Please tell me where you got that huge peg board panel.
Home Depot. $20 for a 4x8" sheet.
I don't think cities are organisms because the individual parts of a city don't need the city to stay alive. If you remove a wolf from its pack it will continue living and could join another pack, we don't consider the wolf pack a large organism. The same way if we remove a person from a city, you could even move a building (like moving a mobile park home). But in a organisms if you remove a part of it, it will ether die unless its reproducing. I feel like the connection between parts of a city are too loose for it to be considered alive.
Their are animals who do reproduce by splitting themselves, but once they do that they cant undo that. But going back to the wolf pack, a wolf can rejoin a pack. The same way a person could move back into the city.
Now
Now, hear me out
Cities as finite state machines
Go Pack Go!
~Mega Green Bay
I'm optimistic about our new coach!
Please make a video about Detroit and its metropolitan area.
For the Saskatoon part, you should have said the Saskatoon berry
Okay but... if it's more efficient for a person to live in a city vs the country, why is it so much more expensive to live in a city?
@2:08 that is not a whale, that is a whale shark, which is a fish not a mammal. Looks like the Okinawa aquariums.
How about a metaphor for ears so we can all start listening to eachother
upvote for Catan :)
4:54 My city! the 612
2:09 is actually a shark, not a whale. :-)
How about this: An organism is a machine!
Well cities build themselves they expand somtimes they divide!
Mention Green Bay more. We don’t get to see our small town on non packer videos very often. I can get you plenty of b-roll lol
I've often mistaken Saskatoon for a racoon.
talk about atlanta georgia!!! my hometown babey
Every so called "scientist" that does not see that the universe is a living thing is just a mechanic. His mind can only process the obvious parts of life before his eyes.
Everything is alive. Life does not end at the other side of a cell's membrane. A city is an organism too. There is no isolated system in the universe. It's systems within systems, overlapping each other.
God is life itself. Everything in life is connected. We are part of a greater being. Religions are just different languages, they are an attempt to communicate this insight to other humans. With science getting more and more of the picture (macrocosm, microcosm), and people getting educated about it, it will be easier and easier for everyone to understand it.
For that:☮️, you have to see this:☯️.
wonder how long it took him to find rhyming animals to those cities
I outsourced it to Twitter!
Yep