If cities are organisms, how do they evolve and what role do designers play?

View cities as organisms and analyze the role of culture and role differentiation in their evolution. We’ll also discuss how urban designers should respect and develop the genetic elements of cities.

 

There are many ways to study cities. Some analyze cities structurally, while others study them in relation to policy. In particular, recent advances in data and technology have led to the emergence of methodologies that analyze cities using big data and artificial intelligence. This has made it possible to analyze and predict urban traffic patterns, population movements, environmental issues, etc. in more detail. However, understanding how cities are changing can be limited to just numbers and graphs. It is not only the physical structure and policies of a city, but also the lives and cultures of the people who live in it that matter.
There is a field of study that looks at cities as organisms, called urban ecology. Human ecology is a biological and sociological theory of human organization that is applied to cities. Since cities are places where people live, human ecology can be applied to them. However, urban ecology is mostly biochemical analysis of a single phenomenon or information, and rarely deals with how cities will change in the future. However, we shouldn’t view cities as simply fixed in their current state. Cities are like living organisms that are constantly changing and evolving. So I’m going to look at cities as organisms, examine how they have evolved, and give my opinion on how they will evolve in the future. Ultimately, I will talk about how those who design cities should look at them and how they should be designed.
The linguistic definition of organism is “an organism whose many parts are unified and organized under a common purpose, so that each part bears an inevitable relationship to the whole.” If we think of a city as an organism, the whole is the city, and the parts are the government, religious organizations, businesses, and citizens. Since its birth, biological organisms have grown in size by self-replicating useful genes, and through this, they have created various organs to create a survival machine. In biological organisms, there is something that transmits its traits while replicating: DNA. DNA allows for self-replication, evolution, and adaptation. So what is the role of DNA in cities? To find out, let’s take a look at what DNA does. DNA carries genetic information. It transmits the traits of the current generation to the next generation, and sometimes the genetic material in the DNA changes as the generation evolves and adapts. In this sense, the DNA of a city is its culture. The definition of culture is simply “the product of the material and mental processes by which individuals or groups of human beings in a society have transformed nature.” The word product is what DNA does. While culture is not transmitted in a discrete way like genetic material in an organism, it is analogously embedded in a city and shapes its appearance and identity.
For example, the West and the East have different cultures, and their cities are different because of the differences in the way they have adapted to different environments. The concept of culture as DNA is the meme. Meme is a combination of the Greek words “mimeme” and “gene,” which means a unit of cultural transmission or imitation. In other words, they are the genes of a culture. One of the characteristics of a meme is that it replicates itself. Not all self-replication is successful, which is similar to natural selection. Several memes come together to form a complex, a classic example being religion. Just as large organisms compete with other organisms, so do complexes of memes. This is exactly what happens with religion.
Cities use memes to pass on their traits to the next generation. How will cities evolve in the future? Modern cities have one major difference from their predecessors: they are closer together. Spatially, this means that cities on the other side of the world can be reached within a day thanks to advances in transportation. Culturally, the development of the Internet and media has allowed the cultures of each city to influence each other, and economically, the roles of each city have been increasingly decentralized, making them dependent on each other. You might think that as cities become closer, their memes would become more similar. However, I think the opposite is true: the memes of the cities will be very different. The economic and industrial fragmentation of cities is a big deal. Pre-modern cities had to be agricultural, commercial, and residential centers all at the same time, but modern cities are primarily focused on one function.
As the roles of cities have become more specialized, they have also become more distinctive. This change is not just economic or industrial. Along with environmental changes, cities’ ability to adapt to climate change is also emerging as an important factor in their evolution. In particular, climate change and environmental issues have led to a growing interest in sustainable urban development. In this context, an urban ecological approach is becoming increasingly important. The ability to adapt to environmental changes is essential for cities to survive and thrive.
In addition, the modern era has created many new types of cities due to the densification of the population in cities and the development of industry due to the Industrial Revolution. In Korea, many cities have emerged in modern times, such as Ilsan and Bundang as badtowns (satellite cities specializing in residential areas) and cities such as Banwol and Ansan as industrial cities. These new cities have different roles and therefore different memes. Badtowns are quiet during the day, but at night, people gather to enjoy leisure, while industrial cities are busy during the day but quiet at night. An example of this is the cafe street in Jeongdong-gu, Bundang. In the future, cities will also take on new roles.
Cities have evolved to gradually divide roles, and there are many cities with new roles. So how should people who design and manage cities take a stance and act? My position is that cities should be developed in a way that does not significantly change the city’s genes by respecting the culture of the city as much as possible. To say this, let’s first look at biological organisms. What role does an urban designer play in a biological organism?