quality of life —what is it?
Let's look at the morning, repetitive, daily process: „Have to drive my child to school in my car again!!! —Traffic jams; peak driving; no place to park.” I would increase the quality of my life if I could effortlessly „publicize” my need to eliminate daily stress, so that it would reach various addressees at the same time: cab drivers, audiences on social forums, the city administration, municipal companies. Someone would respond with a commercial idea ("I take my kids to school"), a change in the streetcar stop or schedule, the organization of transportation by a group of parent-neighbors, and so on. Technically speaking, there would be a cybernetic, feedback response of the system, its spontaneous adaptation.
Geographically localized, the sum of such notifications would become a reliable and valid guideline for urban planning, the strategy of municipal companies, civic cooperation organized in NGOs or simply neighborly, informal cooperation.
Technology today allows this. This is how commercial commerce and services function —based on real, ongoing data streams. This is how numbers/portals #311 function in cities in the United States and other cities not only in the Western world. This is how our cities could function.
All it takes is proper integration and opening of public and private systems to unlimited streams of digital data, and self-organization and self-improvement of city systems will emerge. Our city will become resilient, properly responding to inevitable changes —adaptive. And we will be surprised by the increase in our well-being.
The adaptive city model —can the administration solve my problems?
Here we must devote some space to views on the social and physical nature of the city itself. The starting thesis: the city, an urbanized area, is a complex system and is subject to the rules of complexity theory. Moreover, the city is a complex adaptive system. The development of the city is initiated and guided by the current, often divergent decisions of the residents, and implemented not only by the administration, but primarily by various stakeholder groups. The city in fact consists of many „nested” complex systems. Today, stakeholder groups are poorly communicating groups: various administrations, public services, experts, municipal service providers, private investors, NGOs and ad hoc citizen agreements.
Krzysztof Görlich —Ph. D., oceanographer, former councilman and vice mayor of Krakow, entrepreneur. Currently CEO of an IT company. He participated in Krakow's transformation of the Solvay Soda Plant area, the vicinity of the Central Railway Station, Lenin Steelworks, co-created the plan for activation of Zablocie. He cooperated with the design team of the 1994 general plan of Krakow.
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The city as a complex system is subject to processes of spontaneous self-organization and processes of unpredictable change resulting from a combination of repetitive processes (iterations) and accompanying feedbacks —couplings. The city is capable of functioning properly in a system that is far from perfect —suboptimal. The development and resilience of the city to negative changes is fostered by operating „at the edge of chaos” and a high level of cultural and institutional diversity, but also by a wealth of technical solutions. Network ties, relations between actors of the urban collective, i.e. social capital, rather than administrative decisions, are the basic mechanisms of organizing structures in urban space. The mechanism of self-organization is based on simple rules, but often produces very complex and fundamentally unpredictable results.
There is a high level of uncertainty as to what direction things will go in the city. As if this were not enough, the city is most often not a single system, but a system of „nested” complex systems. To this we can add interesting observations about non-linear systems, which are complex systems, including the city. The behavior of such a system over time quickly becomes unpredictable, despite the deterministic description of the basic, simple rules that govern it. The system tends toward chaos, an increase in entropy.
However, „centers of order” appear in such systems. The appearance of such ordering in a nonlinear system, the so-called strange attractor, and its form are unpredictable. This property has serious implications for those involved in forecasting and design based on the assumption that everything can be predicted and effectively controlled by the complex organism of the city. Although the characteristics of emerging phenomena cannot be predicted, attempts can be made to moderate them on a system-wide scale, that is, to create conditions that enhance or inhibit selected processes. Transferring these observations to urban reality, in the complex systems of urbanized areas we observe the formation of local „orders”, spontaneous structures —cooperating communities or concentrations of private investment. This happens very often regardless of the intentions of the administration, or even against those intentions.
These structures are often initiated by a seemingly insignificant event. In Krakow, for example, with the opening of a restaurant in the old Debniki district, the settlement of a forgotten loft in Podgórze, the upgrading of several apartment blocks in old Nowa Huta. These local events trigger processes of large, rapid and sustained change over a significant area —as in complex nonlinear systems. Phenomena of spontaneous self-organization, emergence of „attractors” in urbanized space should be understood by designers and administrators and taken into account in planning methodology.
The complex system of an adaptive city could function more effectively if it were conditioned to be supported by integrated information systems that provide and process data in real time. The conditions for an effectively adaptive city are the functioning of city-wide digital systems capable of collecting, processing and sharing processed and „raw” information. Further, the spontaneous building of dozens of utility applications that make people's lives easier and disseminate knowledge about the city. And above all this should be multilateral communication between residents, administration, services, municipal service providers, entrepreneurs, civic groups. And finally, procedures for participatory planning and self-improvement of urban infrastructure and services.
the cycle of an adaptive city
If all the conditions for interactive communication, the recording of relevant information in spatial databases and the proliferation of IT-supported services were met, the adaptive city would operate in an iterative cycle of self-improvement. The beginning of all this, however, must be the ability to voice my needs and record them where they will be processed into information and knowledge important for ongoing decisions and planning for change.
Technology, of course, is not the goal; it can only be a tool. Also, growth and development of the city are not goals. After all, the goal is the quality of my life in the city in harmony with the people and space of the city. In this sense, the city should be a product of my needs balanced with the needs of others.
