Embrace Complexity
Cities are magnificently complex, and Arun Jain’s interdisciplinary approach to urban design reveals how we can plan and craft our urban settlements without playing God. He urges us to embrace complexity in all its forms with measured confidence and a sense of humility, forming a pragmatic basis for us to strategically intervene in evolving urban and social systems that defy our ability to control them. Urban designers and planners address interrelated issues and opportunities, balancing how we learn, move, communicate, work, and play within the context of evolving man-made and natural systems. With over three decades of global experience, Arun has contemplated and contributed to these kinds of projects, comprising over $14 billion in investment.
Driven by the larger context in which our quality of urban life must improve, Arun’s work has included creating a national policy structure and ecology sensitive development tool for the island country of Palau and working across traditional professional silos to foster community enhancing synergies during his tenure as Portland, Oregon’s first Chief Urban Designer.
Arun speaks about capitalizing on what he calls nexus points, where they naturally occur during the evolution of cities, and the challenges around artificially inducing such positive societal pivots. He feels we can improve and adapt more efficiently and with greater sensitivity by creating frameworks, or “good bones” in communities and cities. He feels that imperfect and enduring cities are far more interesting than artificial constructions: reflective of life itself – messy and incomplete, yet always full of future potential, possibility, and hope. Cities like us, are always better as works in progress.
Show Notes
- More reading:
- Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson
- The Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter
- From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds by Daniel C. Dennett
- The Story of Utopias by Lewis Mumford
- Watch this captivating series, The Ascent of Man, charting the progress of humanity from flint tools to relativity theory
- In case you haven’t heard of Sim City…
- Check out The Venice Biennale, an arts organization in Venice (you might need Google’s Page Translate on this one)
- Read about the Bauhaus art and architecture movement that Arun references
- “How Portland Does It“: more about the downtown plan for Portland, Oregon
- Watch one of Arun’s favorite movies, Another Earth
- How we’re like ants (but not ants): a fascinating article on how networks run the world
- You can read the Central Portland Plan Urban Design Assessment by the Portland Bureau of Planning