Systems Community of Inquiry

Hi David!
I put my final work on the blog.

http://systemic-thinking.blogspot.com/2011_03_01_archive.html

Br,

G.

Hi David,

I posted my essay:

http://mikkoahlstrom.wordpress.com/2011/03/14/day-3-and-beyo…urban-planning/

Regards,
Mikko

Hello David,

I have posted a draft to my final paper here:

http://iepureb.wordpress.com/

Regards,
Bianca

@olli Thanks for the writing on urban planning as a service, city development, conversations and behavior change posted to Dropbox. The writing shows that you’re forming your own synthesis of ideas on systems thinking in application to personal relevance.

The Government of Ontario Programs and Services Reference Model has served as a foil for you, to challenge the idea of urban planning as currently conceived. With your description of the current state, it would seem that urban planning is mostly a process that could potentially transformed into a service if the client and public goals could be clearly identified. It might help to work bottom-up from the role of an urban planner, and then attempt a reformation of the organization — urban planning might or might not be better served as an integrated department (a structure) rather than decentralized function (i.e. across departments). The idea of a Systemic City Development is courageous, driving me to think about appropriate involvement of citizens, taxpayers, political representatives and public servants.

Sweeping in Castells, Jacobs and Florida — all systems thinkers to a greater degree — and making parallelism to mobile phone technologies (i.e. platforms and services) directly surfaces the questions as to where system boundaries should be drawn. Establishing a foundation platform (for either a city or a mobile telephony service) could be a way of establishing either the minimal or desirable level of features for service recipients. From Allen’s ideas on supply side sustainability, we would have to watch for feature creep in building up a sustainable low gain regime into a higher gain design that requires more resources.

The facilitation of conversation and dialogue seems to be emerging as a direction of personal development where you could build some competences. I sense that you might end up putting a lot of the systems thinking content into your background knowledge, while engaging your participants in the issues at hand.

On the topic of behavior change, I’m thinking about social aspects (i.e. sharing goals/objectives/ideals, as one person ascribes desiderata onto the potential actions of another) versus the perspective of human nature. This places in the dilemma of being human with minimal self-control, as opposed to living consciously with an appreciation of the world on which we have collective impact.

There’s probably a reframing of gatekeepers that is appropriate. In the the writings of Karen Stephenson, a gatekeeper is a role in a social network who can either decelerate or accelerate the flow of information. This places us directly in the dialectic between CS0004 (i.e. the community knows better) versus CS0005 (i.e. the expert knows better). I encourage the idea of managing systems by managing their contexts, with the challenge that a system can have many contexts (and potentially multiple gatekeepers in different containing systems) that are enough to make the simplest solutions at least complicated, if not complex.

@gabuabdo I looked both at your final essay and the starting point for the presentation with Viikinranta as joint work with @jannesalovaara and @wannes . I hope that my comments are in time to help with your continuing studies.

I have two suggestions, both foundational. The first is to return to Russell Ackoff’s definition of systems thinking, where “Synthesis precedes analysis”, and the first step is to “Identify a containing whole (system) of which the thing to be explained is a part”. The second suggestion is to heed the principles prescribed by Allen, Tainter and Hoekstra, specifically “2. Manage systems by managing their contexts”. While systems thinking includes both analysis (taking things apart) and synthesis (putting things together), the key test of whether systems thinking is exhibited is whether synthesis precedes analysis.

When you speak of urban design as planning, this system includes both the planners (at least) and engaged citizens (who may or may not be articulate with their wants and needs). The design emerges as a result of learning together (in the spirit of consilience, as you frame in the Viikinranta slides), and the process of construction, use, and renewal. While your criticisms of architectural practice are harsh, it’s human nature to pursue such activities, just as beavers build dams. The question may be how we do the least harm, both in terms of impact on the natural environment, and the constraints that we place on occupants who are targeted to enjoy these built works.

I would encourage you to think about Stewart Brand’s pacing layers (previously called shearing layers) in terms of the slow constraining the fast. This thinking shares a common foundation in hierarchy theory with T.F.H. Allen, in that it emphasizes layers in time (i.e. processes) as opposed to the conventional thinking of layers at a moment in time (i.e. structures). You have covered this idea in saying both that no systems is infinitely sustainable, and that human beings can’t predict the future. Recognizing that we can design for periods that we do understand (e.g. we know about the expected durability for building materials) and that we can channel collective effort in a productive way (e.g. we can shape or “(co)-create” our futures for some years, if not decades) leads to the optimism and hope that we hold for future generations.

In your “Guidelines for a self-evolving city”, you’ve taken a dualist approach in separating the non-physical features of the design from the physical. In an alternative, you might consider a non-dualist approach, where the features are not separated. This is a deep philosophical change, but not uncommon among architects who take a perspective of phenomenology. I am reminded of a visit to Helsinki some years ago where I learned of phenomology in the design of the Kiasma by Steven Holl. This contributed to my appreciation of Being in the World by Hubert Dreyfus and his Philosophy 185 lectures at U.C. Berkeley, making the ideas of Martin Heidegger accessible to me. It will require some effort, but reorienting towards “being in Viikinranta” — while maintaining an emphasis on synthesis preceding analysis — could be rewarding.

The conclusions of your essay reflect that you’ve internalized the lessons from the lectures that human beings — including urban designers and architects — are not omnipotent. The two courses, CS0004 and CS0005, were only introductions to systems thinking in the context of the Creative Sustainability program, which I believe will continue to challenge the way that you look at the world in the future.

@mikkoahlstrom On your writing On Urban Planning, I know — from the previous blog posts — for Day 1 and Day 2 — that you had read and appreciated the references, so the challenge with the final essay is a stylistic one: a reader who was not in the class might think that you haven’t done your homework, when I’m sure that you have. Surfacing the references and making explicit citations on points throughout the writing are a characteristic of academic writing that you’ll have improve.

In that sense, your section on “It’s soft and hard” begs for linkages to Soft Systems Methodology. “From broad to condensed and back” could have cited Ackoff’s “synthesis precedes analysis”, T.F.H. Allen’s “Manage systems by managing their contexts”, or Brand’s pacing layers. “Everyone has an opinion” could have cited Banathy’s approach to generative dialogue, or Churchman’s design of inquiring systems. “Planning is indirect” could have emphasized the latter parts of Ackoff’s interactive planning method, or the Ontario Programs and Services Reference Model (which you blogged about in Day One). “The project at hand” could have referenced the definitions of resilience, sustainability and/or sustainable development.

I know you know this content. I hope that in future academic work — as well a professional activities where credible supporting sources are expected — that you’ll help out readers who are not as familiar with the domain as you.

@daniello You aren’t the only one thinking about sustainability possibilities in a biocentric or anthrocentric system.

At the Resilience 2011 meeting, I was listening to discussions about moving from the Holocene to the Anthropocene, reflecting the impact that human beings can have on our world.

This is a case of evolution, where the natural systems and human systems are ecologies simultaneously changing and interacting with each other. Tainter generally focused on sociopolitical collapse, while T.F.H. Allen takes examples from nature to develop the isomorphies for systems in general.

Perhaps, as human beings, we extend the lives of systems too long, and we should allow more natural cycles of collapse and reorganization (through release) to occur.