Learning from Biology, Not Physics
This week, the latest book in the Strong Towns series, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town, was released everywhere books are sold. You can pick up your copy here, but in the meantime, we’d like to give you a sneak preview of Chapter Twelve (in slightly modified format).
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Learning from Biology, Not Physics
In the 20th century, a lot of the challenges that engineers, planners, and other city-building professionals faced seemed simple and straightforward. They were almost one-dimensional in nature, or they could at least be credibly reduced to one dimension.
Consider traffic congestion. If a street has too much traffic and drivers routinely experience significant delay and unpredictable travel times, the one-dimensional answer was to build more capacity. In the decades immediately after World War II, there was not only the budget for this kind of response, but the systems of governance also gave engineers wide latitude to execute their plans without interference from a public that may might not fully agree. If building more capacity meant tearing down half the businesses along Main Street or taking out a neighborhood’s sidewalks, trees, and crossings, then that was the price paid for what was perceived as progress.
Large budgets and unchecked authority provide the luxury of being able to see a problem like traffic congestion, or even transportation in general, as one-dimensional. It allows the professional to approach the practice of engineering as if it were a mathematical equation to be worked out, one with a single, definite answer. This is an approach similar to Newtonian physics, where equations are used to derive insights that can then be verified through simple experimentation.
In general, engineers feel most comfortable working in cities when they can treat them like a physics problem. Professional engineers are unparalleled in their capacity to solve problems that are presented to them in this way. They have manuals, charts, codes, and other guides to help them apply best practices. They confidently project what traffic will be in 20 years based on their measurements of traffic over prior decades. They know what will happen when that new housing subdivision goes in, or a new traffic signal is installed, because they have equations that (they believe) tell them exactly what will happen.
This was all fine when society could ignore the problems that arose in the wake of bad engineering practices; when we had abundant resources to throw at every complication that arose, or at least the ones we cared about. That street expansion to cure congestion may have destroyed the downtown business community, but we can tell ourselves that there are now jobs to be had at the big box store on the edge of town. We can provide aggrieved citizens some tax rebates and tuition subsidies to adapt to the new reality, which also now includes the low, low prices that our economic models suggest are optimal.
As we continue to fight congestion in one dimension, we develop more and more narratives to explain away the problems that were building up. Suggestions that Americans are spoiled, politicians are cheap, and engineers are underappreciated are all narrative coping mechanisms for professionals conditioned to work in only one dimension.
Over time, the ignored or discounted problems become increasingly difficult to suppress, especially as our resources simultaneously become stretched. Ultimately, the urgent problems we face in our cities, such as congestion but also many more, stop presenting as something akin to physics but instead act more like biology, where many complex variables interact to create an emergent and largely unpredictable order. In biological systems, there are no simple solutions, or even simple explanations, only complex feedback loops that drive adaptation or failure.
Of course, cities have always been complex, adaptive systems. In Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity, I called cities “human habitat” and noted that:
Such systems are experienced as emergent. Their order is not imposed; it just appears, as if by magic. Each interaction may be understandable on its own, but the complexity of interactions makes the entire system unpredictable. Everyone learns from experience, adapts their individual behavior and, in doing so, continuously impacts everyone else.
We often think of evolution as a process that happens incrementally over time. That’s close, but the full reality is more like how Hemingway described bankruptcy: gradually, then all at once. Traumatic events, large and small, force both adaptation and failure. The combination creates the learned wisdom that is passed on to subsequent generations.
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Regardless of what happens in the coming decades, two things seem abundantly clear for our broader society, but specifically for city engineering and related professions. The first is that we are very unlikely to return to the approach of the 1950s where complex problems could be grossly simplified so that they could be overcome with seemingly unlimited budgets and latitude. Our cities have taken on too many liabilities, and they lack the necessary financial productivity for that approach to be repeated, even if a more informed and actively involved society were to allow it.
The second is that these urgent financial constraints will force engineers to adapt; to develop new approaches to what are really an old set of problems. If it is to be relevant, the practice of engineering must expand beyond the rote applications of standards and equations to a deeper understanding of complexity. Psychology, sociology, behavioral economics, and many other pursuits that engineers tend to consider softer sciences, and thus not worthy of serious study, are essential for those working with cities as human habitat.
Engineers will need less of a physics mentality and more of a biological approach.
It is unclear if engineering professions can do this on their own, and I suspect that we may end up with a large knowledge gap between two distinct types of civil engineers. The first type will be those that who are comfortable with standards, equations, and a more rote approach. Some of these professionals may make good mid-level managers, but they will be overwhelmed by tomorrow’s problems (or dangerous if given too much authority and budget).
I hope this first type of engineer will end up working for the second type, the true problem solvers. These are people who are able to humbly grasp the overwhelming complexity of human habitat and work, as an expert but also as a servant, to nurture—I almost want to use the word “birth”—approaches that address localized challenges in co-creation with the people they are serving. I have met this kind of engineer and they are astounding people, but they almost always struggle within the current system because the business model of engineering lavishly rewards the first type of engineer. That must change.
Local leaders can encourage that change by rejecting rote engineering approaches and simplistic solutions to what are clearly complex problems. Even more proactively, they can structure engineering contracts and engagements to reward value added instead of merely the size of project. We should reject contract approaches that compensate professionals as a percentage of the project size or for studies that merely recommend more engineering work. We should pay engineers a premium when they use their skills and expertise to solve problems while also reducing costs and building long-term wealth and prosperity within the community.
Read the rest of Confessions of a Recovering Engineer by ordering your copy today!
The terms chosen to describe upcoming road work often misrepresent the actual projects, ascribing a positive or negative bias that affects how political leaders interpret and underwrite them. The DOT Decoder is the perfect gift for decoding three common terms used by departments of transportation and their engineers.