I'm trying to find a way to explain what I'm thinking regarding social networks' fractal nature, and how the topology of these fractal social networks is complex. Of course I thought I'd go see what other people have said on this topic, and ran across "Connecting the Fractal City," by Nikos A. Salingaros.
You know how sometimes you run across something and you see that it's so relevant to so many things on so many levels you just can't isolate one yet? Like that.
He does give public policy suggestions, but in the meantime, because I think there's importance here in all kinds of areas beyond policy, A TEENY excerpt:
"The principal obstacle to urban regeneration is our society's philosophy of disconnectedness. Trying to introduce living urban fabric nowadays runs counter to most people's conception of order. We adopted an urban and architectural typology of nonliving forms in the twentieth century, and now this built environment has taught us a nonliving model of the universe. Our basic understanding of how the universe works is prejudiced by the built examples around us, as well as by an accompanying philosophy that falsely opposes modernity to traditional living processes. As a result, people consider surviving urban and architectural forms that embody life to be "impure", "old-fashioned", and even "reactionary". Within this prevalent worldview, it is extremely difficult to RECOGNIZE living structure, which is a prerequisite for any interventions that aim to GENERATE living structure.
"I come back to the basic rule that urban morphology is determined by the city's transportation web. Faced with a dysfunctional city, innovative planning will be ineffective unless the transportation network and infrastructure are changed. That's very difficult to do, and, moreover, it's extremely expensive. Cities might not wish to undertake such a drastic reorganization also for philosophical reasons, since it implies changing their codes of growth corresponding to their "genes". Most cities around the world, however, did successfully change their genes to re-grow a car city out of an initially pedestrian city, so it is in principle possible to do the reverse.
"Urban regeneration today separates into two distinct problems -- how to bring the car city to life, and how to revitalize dead pedestrian inner cities. In the first case, we have to build a pedestrian network inside the car city, erasing some of it in the process. Surprisingly, this goal can be achieved without seriously restricting the car/truck network. We need not sacrifice connectivity. The second case -- the slum -- is far more difficult to fix, since it is created by social problems driving out the healthy mixture of urban functions that define a living city. The people who live in an inner-city slum are disconnected from the rest of the city because of high crime, narcotics, and a lack of education and job skills. They lack long-scale social connections for information exchange.
"I will not attempt to address the social problems that complicate urban regeneration in the inner city. Nevertheless, understanding one aspect of this complex phenomenon is almost trivially simple. People with very little power and influence should not be blamed for the urban problems the slum now poses. The more powerful economic classes just ceased to value the inner city as an urban environment, and absconded to the suburbs. Someone had to fill the vacated region, and, since no-one with any money considered it a desirable living environment, it was left to those with no other choice. In this interpretation, the slum dwellers serve an essential urban function, filling up regions that nobody else wants.
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