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I grew up in a small town and have always thought of buildings and construction as mankind making purposeful changes to their structures, be they houses, barns, irrigation systems or roads. The concept of change in this manner, as I took it, was very methedological and systematic: controlled and orchestrated by man.

Now, as a young man, I live in one of the world’s most international cities, flush with development. Buildings are being built and destroyed daily. Large scale transit projects are moving forward at a scale that I can see on my walk to work. While the concept of human-initiated methedological and systematic change sits in the back of my mind as the obvious and necessary initiator for this revolutionary progress, I can’t help but ponder certain questions.

On the level of the individual project, yes, the methodology is the same: human initiated construction or destruction. The same simple processes I had observed growing up, just on a grander scale. But, what if, each individual action while consciously made was tied into a larger emergent unconscious system?

Sitting quietly by the ocean and viewing the city as a whole, the changes seem natural, or at the very least organic, in their cycling. The births, lives, and deaths of these parts of our city: the residential megaplexes, the commercial towers thrusting above the clouds, all the way down to the ground level, it ebbs and flows in a very natural way, with areas spurring into a furor of activity and then reaching a point of stability before parts begin to decay; some systems in place divert resources to maintain stability until eventually the decay overcomes the rate of repair and the system collapses. Shortly thereafter, a new set of buildings and infrastructure will combine to form a subsystem which will replace the old. Areas of the city surge with life and construction at one point only to be dead and forgotten the next. Socio-economic factors, along with human changes in need, taste and population modify the parameters of the larger system.

Imagine an ant, going about its daily toil; pick up a small rock and return it to the colony. This action is the single task of the individual ant and can, in fact, be observed independently of other colony activities. The great beauty comes when you see the actions of the ant in context of the colony as a whole. Each individual toiling ant carries a single rock, but through their individual contributions, an entire colony is built and sustained.

To stretch the metaphor further, imagine that our city is that colony and the individual construction projects are the single toiling ants. We have something that ants don’t: self-awareness and free-will. What could we achieve if city planners, real-estate agents, developers, banks and even citizens became aware of the urban ecosphere and made their individual decisions with forethought as to how their decisions would affect the entire system? With everyone working to maintain the health of this system, the resources we see shifting constantly to and fro could be utilised more effectively. We could see the organic city I’ve described flourish and with it, sustainability, profit (from reduced reallocation of resources) and most of all, stronger, longer living neighbourhoods, which in turn breed stronger communities. Coming from a small town, that is my wish for this city, stronger, longer lasting communities in homes they can afford in the city they love.

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