Humanity’s best hope for confronting the looming climate crisis rests with the new science of complexity.
The sheer complexity of climate change stops most solutions in their tracks. How do we give up fossil fuels when energy is connected to everything, from great-power contests to the value of your pension? Global economic growth depends on consumption, but that also produces the garbage now choking the oceans. To give up cars, coal, or meat would upend industries and entire ways of life. Faced with seemingly impossible tradeoffs, politicians dither and economists offer solutions at the margins, all while we flirt with the sixth extinction.
That’s why humanity’s last best hope is the young science of complex systems. Quitting coal, making autonomous cars ubiquitous, ending the middle-class addiction to consumption: all necessary to head off climate catastrophe, all deemed fantasies by pundits and policymakers, and all plausible in a complex systems view.
Roland Kupers shows how we have already broken the interwoven path dependencies that make fundamental change so daunting. Consider the mid-2000s, when, against all predictions, the United States rapidly switched from a reliance on coal primarily to natural gas. The change required targeted regulations, a few lone investors, independent researchers, and generous technology subsidies. But in a stunningly short period of time, shale oil nudged out coal, and carbon dioxide emissions dropped by 10 percent. Kupers shows how to replicate such patterns in order to improve transit, reduce plastics consumption, and temper the environmental impact of middle-class diets. Whether dissecting China’s Ecological Civilization or the United States’ Green New Deal, Kupers describes what’s folly, what’s possible, and which solutions just might work.
Complexity Systems in the Social and Behavioral Sciences provides a sophisticated yet accessible account of complexity science or complex systems research. Phenomena in the behavioral, social, and hard sciences all exhibit certain important similarities consistent with complex systems. These include the concept of emergence, sensitivity to initial conditions, and interactions between agents in a system that yield unanticipated, nonlinear outcomes. The topics discussed range from the implications for artificial intelligence and computing to questions about how to model complex systems through agent-based modeling, to complex phenomena exhibited in international relations, and in organizational behavior. This volume will be an invaluable addition for both the general reader and the specialist, offering new insights into this fascinating area of research.
Today, the field of architecture faces a reckoning. While there is no longer consensus on what defines an architectural work, theorists, historians, and practitioners are grappling with urgent issues—among them the impact of climate change, the dynamics of power and race in relation with the built environment, and the technological, practical, and ethical dimensions of architecture. As established practices, academic objectives, and professional expectations come under scrutiny, architecture is in search of new definitions, identities, and voices.
Inspired by Italo Calvino’s memos about literature in the twenty-first century, this volume—the second in a series— situates architecture within a broad framework, exploring its complex interactions with environmental, cultural, political, social, artistic, and technological forces. The editors’ objective is to spur conversation across the boundaries that divide architecture’s theorists and historians from practitioners. In addition to the editors, the contributors include Sanford Kwinter, Aleksandra Jaeschke, Jennifer Mack, Rahul Mehrotra, Charles Waldheim, Kristi Cheramie, Jesse Reiser, Julian Harake, Jenny E. Sabin, Charles Davis, Esra Akcan, and David Karmon.
“If it were necessary, for some curious legal reason, to draw a clear line between human and nonhuman—for example, if a group of Australopithecines were to appear and one had to decide if they were to be protected by Fair Employment Laws or by the ASPCA—I would welcome them as humans if I knew that they were seriously concerned about how to bury their dead.” In this witty and wise way, Lawrence Slobodkin takes us on a spirited quest for the multiple meanings of simplicity in all facets of life.
Slobodkin begins at the beginning, with a consideration of how simplicity came into play in the development of religious doctrines. He nimbly moves on to the arts—where he ranges freely from dining to painting—and then focuses more sharply on the role of simplicity in science. Here we witness the historical beginnings of modern science as a search for the fewest number of terms, the smallest number of assumptions, or the lowest exponents, while still meeting criteria for descriptive accuracy. The result may be an elegant hypothetical system that generates the apparent world from less apparent assumptions, as with the Newtonian revolution; or it may mean deducing non-obvious processes from everyday facts, as with the Darwinian revolution.
Slobodkin proposes that the best intellectual work is done as if it were a game on a simplified playing field. He supplies serious arguments for considering the role of simplification and playfulness in all of our activities. The immediate effect of his unfailingly captivating essay is to throw open a new window on the world and to refresh our perspectives on matters of the heart and mind.
The world is complex, but acknowledging its complexity requires an appreciation for the many roles context plays in shaping natural phenomena. In Unsimple Truths, Sandra Mitchell argues that the long-standing scientific and philosophical deference to reductive explanations founded on simple universal laws, linear causal models, and predict-and-act strategies fails to accommodate the kinds of knowledge that many contemporary sciences are providing about the world. She advocates, instead, for a new understanding that represents the rich, variegated, interdependent fabric of many levels and kinds of explanation that are integrated with one another to ground effective prediction and action.
Mitchell draws from diverse fields including psychiatry, social insect biology, and studies of climate change to defend “integrative pluralism”—a theory of scientific practices that makes sense of how many natural and social sciences represent the multi-level, multi-component, dynamic structures they study. She explains how we must, in light of the now-acknowledged complexity and contingency of biological and social systems, revise how we conceptualize the world, how we investigate the world, and how we act in the world. Ultimately Unsimple Truths argues that the very idea of what should count as legitimate science itself should change.
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