Organized Complexity

Definition

Organized complexity is Jane Jacobs's answer to "the kind of problem a city is" (Ch. 22): drawing on Warren Weaver's 1958 Rockefeller Foundation essay, she places cities in the third of science's three stages of thought — after problems of simplicity (two variables, the physical sciences to 1900) and problems of disorganized complexity (billions of variables, probability theory, statistical mechanics) — the middle region of "situations in which a half-dozen or even several dozen quantities are all varying simultaneously and in subtly interconnected ways" (Weaver, quoted in Jacobs 1961, p. 433). "Cities happen to be problems in organized complexity, like the life sciences… The variables are many, but they are not helter-skelter; they are 'interrelated into an organic whole'" (p. 433). Her exhibit is the neighborhood park, where "any single factor… is slippery as an eel; it can potentially mean any number of things, depending on how it is acted upon by other factors" (p. 433).

The diagnosis of planning failure is a category error: "The theorists of conventional modern city planning have consistently mistaken cities as problems of simplicity and of disorganized complexity" — Howard's Garden City as a two-variable system (housing ↔ jobs), Le Corbusier's Radiant City as "a celebration, in art, of the potency of statistics and the triumph of the mathematical average" (pp. 435–436). Because it "lacks the first requisite for a body of practical and progressing thought: recognition of the kind of problem at issue," city planning "has found the shortest distance to a dead end" (p. 439). The working tactics for organized complexity: (1) "to think about processes"; (2) "to work inductively, reasoning from particulars to the general, rather than the reverse"; (3) "to seek for 'unaverage' clues involving very small quantities, which reveal the way larger and more 'average' quantities are operating" (p. 440) — her example is a bookstore chain's hours table, which "tells us that Brooklyn's downtown is too dead by 8 P.M… No surveys… can tell us anything so relevant… as this small, but specific and precisely accurate, clue" (p. 442). "It takes large quantities of the 'average' to produce the 'un-average' in cities" (p. 442).

Key Thinkers

• Jane Jacobs — the concept's author and the book's methodological self-description (1961, Ch. 22).
• Warren Weaver (not yet paged — see log) — the Rockefeller Foundation scientist whose three-stage history of scientific thought supplies the taxonomy (p. 429ff).

Related Concepts

• empirical-methods — the method family Jacobs's inductivism and unaverage-clue practice belong to.
• systems-theory — the feedback model of Ch. 13 and the "interrelated into an organic whole" framing both run on systems concepts (p. 251, 440).
• cataclysmic-money — the institutional refusal of process-thinking: money "in cataclysmic form" as the practical counterpart of average-thinking.
• self-destruction-of-diversity — the first built application: the successful district as a feedback-free system.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs 1961) — the concept's chapter (Ch. 22, pp. 428–448): Weaver's three stages (pp. 429–433); the park as the exhibit of interrelated variables (pp. 433–434); the two misidentifications (simplicity: Howard, pp. 435–436; disorganized complexity: statistics, relocation, master plans, pp. 436–439); "City planning, as a field, has stagnated. It bustles but it does not advance" (p. 439); the three thinking habits (p. 440); the unaverage-clue doctrine and the Marboro bookstore hours (p. 442); the nature revaluation (pp. 443–447); the closing regeneration claim (p. 448).
• Dark Age Ahead (Jacobs 2004) — the concept's cultural-scale restatement and its causal clause: "one thing that can be learned is that everything is connected with everything else, not only in its consequences but also in its causes" (p. 22) — the 1961 interconnection thesis extended from the city to culture itself, with Rome, Mesopotamia and China as the exhibit-cases; the organized-complexity epistemology at work in economics — the unaverage-clue method deployed diagnostically on the 2002 Toronto import-replacing boom (a "Made in Canada" chair label, a rising currency, factory clusters as admissible evidence against national averages, pp. 88–95, see import-replacing); the heat-wave case as the anti-reductionist demonstration (community-matching against individual-matching, pp. 81–87); and the method's stakes raised: "Modern life has raised the ante of knowledge required in everything from science to democratic participation. Failures were always stultifying; now they can be devastating" (p. 99). See scientific-state-of-mind, vicious-spirals.

Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.

This page requires fuller treatment — created at the Jacobs ingest; awaits the complexity-theory and post-Jacobs systems literatures (network urbanism, ASO theory) that inherited the claim.

Open Questions

• Jacobs claims life-science tactics transfer in principle to cities but not their objects ("The organizations of living protoplasm and the organizations of living people and enterprises cannot go under the same microscopes," p. 437). Where exactly does the analogy break — and does the wiki's emergence and actor-network-theory registers repair it?
• Her third habit ("unaverage" clues) is an epistemology of the small. How does it relate to the wiki's everyday-methods cluster (Perec's infra-ordinary inventory, de Certeau's tactics) — a shared anti-statistical empirics, or two different "smalls" (the trivial vs. the diagnostic)?