Cities as emergent systems: race as a rule in organized complexity.

• Author: Lord, Charles

1. INTRODUCTION II. CITIES AS EMERGENT SYSTEMS III. PATTERNS OF EMERGENCE IN URBAN AMERICA IV. UNDERSTANDING THE PATTERN: A CASE STUDY IN EMERGENCE V. RACE AND RESIDENTIAL PATTERNS: A LEGACY OF SEGREGATION VI. RACE AS A RULE IN BALTIMORE'S ZONING: 1940 TO 2000 VII. CONCLUSION I. INTRODUCTION

   Human beings are now an urban species. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the majority of the world's human beings now live in cities--and by the middle of the century, eighty percent of human beings will live in cities for the foreseeable future.' At the end of the twentieth century some select cities in the developed world enjoyed a renaissance, as evidenced by slight increases in population and reductions in crime. (2) However, there is a wide sense that in the twenty-first century "even the best-positioned urban areas face severe demographic and economic challenges." (3) The received wisdom is that either misery is a given for most urban dwellers, or that misery emerges in urban life through forces beyond our control. (4) Even as the global population of cities skyrocketed, urban scholars predicted the end of cities as successful human settlements. (5) Furthermore, the city has been treated as something of a mystery, and as such, as an intractable problem. (6) As Michael Batty wrote recently in Science, "Cities are still seen as manifesting a disorder and chaos." (7)

   Accepting the notion that cities are chaotic and mysterious, beyond the ability of policymakers to shape and control, has significant implications, not just for notions of governance and urban policy, but also for issues of justice and equity. That is, if cities are chaotic and unmanageable, then misery and injustice are a given for many if not most urban residents. If cities display patterns of inequity and such patterns are the result of mysterious forces, then managing or governing for justice becomes impossible or unlikely.

   For example, in our field of environmental justice, theorists have largely despaired of understanding whether the distribution of environmental hazards in cities is caused primarily by market forces, or by racial discrimination. (8) Thus, while the evidence is overwhelming that African-American and Hispanic neighborhoods play host to a disproportionately high percentage of environmental "disamenities," (9) there has been no framework for understanding the role of race as a causal factor in distributional inequity. Without a fuller understanding of the roots of environmental injustice, it is hard to chart a way forward for overburdened urban neighborhoods.

   But what if we could understand how and why misery arrives in urban neighborhoods? Is it possible to unpack the mystery and change the outcomes? Our project here is to evaluate whether it is possible to study cities in order to demystify the patterns in modern cities. Specifically, we examine whether race or the market plays the central role in the distribution of a host of environmental disamenities such as junkyards and polluting businesses in the city of Baltimore. We show that though there may be no explicit racism in the decisional records regarding land use and disamenities, (10) we can nonetheless identify that race was the critical factor in the patterns that emerged.

   In this Article, we begin by examining a method for understanding cities not as chaotic and mysterious, but as complex, emergent systems that are amenable to study and to management. As we discuss below, though the great urban theorist Jane Jacobs first articulated this method * for studying cities over forty years ago, it has never been fully explored. (11) Using this method as a lens for studying the city, we propose that the patterns in urban systems, and the rules that create those patterns, can be understood and evaluated. (12)

   In Part III we look at one urban pattern: the distribution of environmental disamenities. Though there is not unanimity on the point, the overwhelming weight of the evidence suggests that one characteristic pattern of the twentieth century city was the unequal distribution of such disamenities. (13) Specifically, the evidence indicates that African-American neighborhoods hosted an unequal share of these land uses. (14) Our review of the studies shows that there has been very little work on whether the distributional patterns in cities over time are a function of race, the market, or both. (15) Absent a clear indication of the role of race as compared to market forces, there is little political and moral weight behind repairing the neighborhoods that are burdened with high levels of unwanted land uses.

   In Part IV, we turn to a specific city and to its pattern of environmental harms. We looked at the city of Baltimore to determine whether there is a pattern of unequal distribution and whether race or market forces seemed to be the dominant rule in the pattern of environmental distribution. Through an exhaustive review of zoning conditional-use decisions, we found that in each decade from 1940 to 2000, the Zoning Board of Appeals and the City Council approved conditional uses such that African-American neighborhoods hosted significantly higher numbers of disamenities than did white neighborhoods. (16) By reviewing the data within each decade, we illustrate that race was the critical causal factor in the siting patterns. (17) Nothing in the zoning code or the decisional records illustrated overt racism in the land-use process in Baltimore over the period from 1940 to 2000. (18) Only by understanding the city as a complex system is it possible then to untangle the mystery of these outcomes and to unpack how race became a causal factor.

   In Parts V and VI we use the model of cities as complex systems (19) to unpack the systemic rules that created the pattern of unequal distribution. Understanding cities as systems helps us to frame our data in a new way and to ask an important and unique question: How might race have emerged as a rule in a facially neutral system? Using the model of cities as emergent systems creates a lens through which to study the land-use system over time; a lens that helps us illustrate how explicit racism in the early part of the twentieth century was incorporated into a facially neutral zoning system over time. Using this approach, our data confirms that race, much more than market forces, served as the rule for generating disproportionate environmental impacts on African-American neighborhoods in one city--Baltimore. (20) Illustrating that race was the rule changes the approach to rebuilding urban neighborhoods. Evidence that race as a rule created the current conditions calls on cities to undertake a systemic analysis of the land-use legal and policy system and to consider remedies to existing conditions.

   We argue, in sum, that cities are not a chaotic mystery. A close study of a city through the lens of emergence theory can reveal, and make sense of, the distributional patterns in a city. In this Article, we apply that lens to the issues of environmental justice to identify the rules that create those patterns. As such, we argue that it is possible to understand and then to modify the rules and the resultant patterns in an urban system in the cause of justice.

2. CITIES AS EMERGENT SYSTEMS

   Some urban scholars have begun to argue that cities are not disordered systems and in fact that "[b]eneath the apparent chaos and diversity of physical form, there is strong order and a pattern that emerges from the myriad of decisions and processes required for a city to develop and expand physically." (21) Many urban theorists now argue that cities are complex adaptive systems that display emergent behavior, (22) and that "cities grow from the bottom up." (23) In other words, emergence theory suggests that cities grow from the choices and behaviors of their individual residents and institutions and not from the dictates of the central planners.

   As such, some argue that cities are self-organizing systems. (24) Such systems display an organized complexity in which patterns and shapes emerge over time through the interactions of individual actors. (25) Self-organizing systems create order not from the decisions of a central authority, but rather order and patterns emerge from the decisions and behaviors of individual actors in the system responding to the system's rules and its feedback loops "driven by diverse interests, agencies, and events." (26) As Stephen Johnson writes, "The city is complex ... because it has a coherent personality, a personality that self-organizes out of millions of individual decisions, a global order built out of local interactions." (27) Patterns of change in a self-organizing system like a city can emerge at the edges of human consciousness--as a sort of macrodevelopment, through the interaction of multiple variables at a millennial scale. (28)

   And yet, though cities are difficult to comprehend, they are not chaotic, nor are they a mystery. The system is complex because there are many actors, but it is organized because the various interactions of these countless individuals and institutions follow a network of systemic rules that create a "distinct macrobehavior." (29) Understood as a problem of "[o]rganized complexity," it is possible to study the city as a living ecosystem, capable of adaptive change. (30) In fact, researchers can draw on the methods of science to seek out and understand the rules that govern or pattern the behavior of individual actors. (31) In short, we can uncover and describe the local, systemic rules that drive the emergent structure that is the modern city.

   Emergent systems are neither inherently good, nor inherently bad--essentially, an emergent system can work toward many different kinds of goals or patterns depending on the rules inherent in the system. (32) If an emergent system and its feedback loops (the rules) create outcomes that we do not like, then it is possible to seek a better system by...