{"id":323,"date":"2011-07-23T10:07:32","date_gmt":"2011-07-23T16:07:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=323"},"modified":"2013-01-28T07:34:29","modified_gmt":"2013-01-28T14:34:29","slug":"the-15-solution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=323","title":{"rendered":"The 15% Solution"},"content":{"rendered":"

Which is a better city: Melbourne or Sydney?\u00a0 Geoffrey West\u2019s and Luis Bettencourt\u2019s provocative ideas (reported here<\/a> and popularized here<\/a>) got some play today in the Sydney Morning Herald<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0 Reprising their argument that cities are 85% alike in the way they look, work, and evolve as a function of size West suggested to the Morning Herald<\/em> that, at the end of the day, this great Australian civic rivalry (and by implication the many others that exist worldwide) really doesn\u2019t matter.\u00a0 Understanding cities, and solving their contemporary problems<\/a>, depends on understanding their universal properties and not the 15% of contextual stuff\u2014geography, history, culture\u2014that makes them individually unique.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Melbourne and Sydney<\/p><\/div>\n

This 85-15 split reminded me of another analysis of human groupings that led to identical numerical results, Richard Lewontin\u2019s famous 1972 study\u00a0of human \u201cracial\u201d variation (summarized here<\/a>).\u00a0 The Harvard biologist made an early name for himself by concluding that 85% of all human genetic variation is contained within<\/em> local populations and that no more than 15% is attributable to variables like local ecology, ancestry, ethnicity, etc.\u00a0 In other words, traditional human \u201cracial\u201d groupings are much more alike than they are different.\u00a0 For Lewontin, the physical characteristics of shape and form widely used to distinguish\u00a0Africans, Asians, and\u00a0Europeans\u00a0are trivial, literally skin deep.\u00a0 West argues much the same for what we take to be the defining formal characteristics of cities like Lagos, Tokyo, and Paris.<\/p>\n

But does this overstate the case?\u00a0 It seems that we can embrace the fundamental sameness of human beings as well as their urban settlements and still see the important number\u2014especially if we\u2019re concerned about the health and well-being of\u00a0 individual<\/em> citizens<\/em>\u2014as being the 15% rather than the 85%.\u00a0 Lewontin has his critics, with some<\/a> arguing that the 15% \u201cracial\u201d difference is critical for understanding the differential susceptibility of human populations to disease and the likely success of alternative treatments even as we accept his larger insight that the human species is a remarkably unified biological entity and that racism has no scientific justification. That is, how we regard the small percentage of difference among humans (whether with a concept of \u201crace\u201d or some other analytical construct) has significant implications for medical diagnosis and, thus, can be a matter of life and death for individuals.<\/p>\n

The same may hold for the small percentage of character differences among cities.\u00a0 The Morning Herald<\/em> story identifies Ed Blakely, an urban planner at the University of Sydney, as someone who sees the 15% difference as \u201ccritical\u201d even as he appreciates the generalizing significance of West’s and Bettencourt\u2019s work.\u00a0 For Blakely the 15% of urban form that can be manipulated provides \u201cplenty of scope for good planning to make a difference\u201d in how cities work and adapt to changing circumstances.<\/p>\n

I would add that it can also make a big difference in the lives of individual citizens and, especially, historically marginalized and\/or subaltern groups, including recent immigrants.\u00a0 West and Bettencourt appreciate Jane Jacobs\u2019 insight that the enormous creativity of cities derives from people and their interactions. \u00a0Indeed, West believes that he has scientifically confirmed the great urbanist\u2019s conjectures about the vitality of urban interactions.\u00a0 West and Bettencourt acknowledge the positive role that urban planning can play in facilitating such interactions.\u00a0 But they still seem to assume–unlike Jacobs–that the built environment is little more than a passive container for human interactions rather than an active determinant of the quality<\/em> of those interactions.\u00a0 \u00a0If we assume the latter, then city-making is better served by attending to the specifics of culture, history, and their relationship to design rather than to general laws of development. \u00a0We should seek the 15% solution to urban problems and challenges, not the 85%.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Which is a better city: Melbourne or Sydney?\u00a0 Geoffrey West\u2019s and Luis Bettencourt\u2019s provocative ideas (reported here and popularized here) got some play today in the Sydney Morning Herald.\u00a0 Reprising their argument that cities are 85% alike in the way […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[8,10,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-sustainability","category-urban-studies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1H2bI-5d","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=323"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2485,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323\/revisions\/2485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}