The chaos and tangled energy of living cities | Hacker News Reader

The chaos and tangled energy of living cities

aeon.co

42 pointsyurisagalov9 comments

Tangle is interesting because it adds texture to the experience of living in a city - but it comes about organically. In Singapore, where I live, the city center is fairly interesting, but the urban public-housing neighbourhoods outside the core are mostly uniform in appearance and lack the variety of forms and colors that would consitute tangle. Everything is similarly arranged on a flat landscape of housing blocks and patches of green spaces; wiring and services are all hidden behind walls or underground to keep things "neat" - the place was built by conformist public planners. There's a minimum of shops scattered around these areas, because inhabitants are presumed not to want the bustle and risks of crowds near their homes.

In contrast, the major Japanese (& European & American) cities have much more variation and exposed complexity - more tangle. Their neighborhoods weren't planned to the same extent, with the same drive towards neatness and hidden complexity. Thus density alone doesn't generate tangle: age and the organic bolting-on of new layers/services is required as well.

This man would have us living in the chaotic, multilayered megacities of dystopian sci-fi - Kowloon Walled Cities writ large and cast into the future. It's not an entirely unpleasant vision.

It's an entirely pleasant vision.

This was beautiful. Just moved from Chicago to Austin, and this article articulates everything I miss about Chicago better than I ever could. Spot-on.

The conclusion w.r.t "smart" cities was curious, though. I'd see "smartifying" as something that would add to the tangle, not subtract from it. Another layer on top of all the others.

Similarly, this article made me homesick for London.

I suppose one angle on smartness is that it provides a simplistic lens on the tangle. If rather than observing the intersection of life, industry and history around us, we tap a single-purpose button on our phones and stare until like magic, the thing we want appears -- if the layers on a city become intangible -- then we lose some of the glorious chaos that is urban life.

Tangle is the thing I love about London. I'm from Perth, Australia, where the tangle is very thin indeed - it's a big suburb. Melbourne is a bit better, but I moved to London in 2002 then visited Melbourne again in 2004, and was shocked how untangled it felt.

One good reason to go "fuckit" and untangle is things like accessibility. Retrofitting this is an absolute arse. Making inner London accessible would basically require rebuilding it from scratch.

Thus, "tangle" is, in engineering terms, "technical debt".

I am a huge fan of tangle in a city - it's what makes it livable and takes away the artificiality of a new suburb. But engineering maintainability is the countervailing force.

The problem, it must be said, is that unlike software engineering, ripping out code is the equivalent of making many, many people homeless, even temporarily, and gutting their history and culture. Sometimes that's the right thing to do, but only sometimes.

I have yet to see any kind of cohesive philosophy giving guidelines on when this is okay and when it is not.

I've often thought that cities represent a good metaphor for software development: large systems, different designers through time, constant maintenence, adaptation to odd quirks.

“[…] And these are programs that have existed for ten years or perhaps fifteen years, growing piece by piece as one craftsman after an other added new features.

Sort of like cities in France you might say, where you can see the extremely old buildings with additions made a few hundred years later all the way up to the present. Where in the field of computing, a program that was started in 1965 is essentially that. So we would always hope for tourists to become system maintainers, and perhaps then they would get hired, after they had already begun working on system programs and shown us that they were capable of doing good work.”

— Richard Stallman, 1986

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.html

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