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Human Habitat

For thousands of years, humans built cities for people who walked. The size of buildings, spacing of destinations, and distances individuals would travel on a routine day were scaled for a society where nearly everyone traveled by foot. This was true for human settlement across all continents, spanning all latitudes.

Today, in North America, we build cities around a more modern transportation technology: the automobile. We have developed different building types, different development styles, and different ways of arranging things on the landscape, all to accommodate a living arrangement based on automobile travel.

If you query Americans about this transition, nearly all would talk about it in terms of progress. Humans of the past used to walk everywhere and so they built settlements around people who walked. Today, we drive everywhere, and so we build our cities around people who drive. Someday people will have jet cars or teleportation technology and their cities will look completely different than ours.

The narrative we tell ourselves is one of progress. We like to think of it in this way because doing so places us on a path of improvement, one where our lives are continually getting better. There is another way to think about these changes, however, that isn't quite as comforting. It's a more plausible narrative, one worth pausing to consider.

When we ponder the layout of ancient cities, we must acknowledge that they are the byproduct of thousands of years of human tinkering. People came together in villages and tried different living arrangements. What worked, they copied and expanded. What didn't work, they discarded. That is, if those experiments hadn't already killed or disbanded them.

Humans used trial-and-error experimentation for thousands of years to refine humanity's approach to building its habitat. By the time history reaches the apex of ancient cities Americans are familiar with, places such as Athens or Rome, those experiments had been tested during times of abundance and scarcity, peace and war, disease, pestilence, stagnation, and growth. The result was a pattern of development that was adaptable, productive, and strong.

This same pattern can be seen in the pre-1900s cities of North America. While the architecture changes with geography and time, the essential layout is the same. A person living in a frontier town in the early 1900s, or Manhattan of the same period, could have bought a meal, earned a paycheck, and found a place to sleep, all within a reasonable walk. In other words, these neighborhoods would have been familiar to our ancient city-dwelling ancestors.

That same insight is no longer true. The way we now build cities in North America would be unrecognizable to an American who lived even a century ago. It would be difficult for them to comprehend a highway, a parking lot, a shopping mall, or a middle-class family in a single-family home with a three-car garage. They would be lost in the world of big box stores, office parks, and cul-de-sacs.

Get beyond whether the changes have been positive or not; there is one important aspect of this shift that is critical to acknowledge: It was abrupt. Humans had been living one way for thousands of years, yet within just a couple of decades, Americans transformed an entire continent around a new set of ideas.

Those ideas were not the byproduct of thousands of years of trial and error experimentation. They did not evolve into being. They originated largely from the writings of a handful of European intellectuals, notions their cultures largely rejected, but Americans - with lots of room, boundless optimism, and no ancient moorings - readily adopted.

In the context of human history, the North American development pattern is the largest human experiment ever attempted. In the blink of an evolutionary eye, we have transformed everything about how we live, get around, interact with each other, make decisions, conduct commerce, fall in love, and countless other aspects of human existence.

There is no going back, but there is useful wisdom we can gain from an understanding of the past.

Complex, Adaptive Systems

There are an infinite number of variables a human habitat must take into consideration. There are things we prioritize in city planning today, such as where water drains and how garbage is disposed of, but there are many other priorities that individual humans struggle to harmonize across a society.

How do we keep our food protected from potential thieves? How do we best raise our children to be acclimated to our culture? How do we take advantage of the sun to heat our house in cold weather? Where do we honorably dispose of our dead? Each individual priority is continually weighed against the others, a balancing act of give and take across time.

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.

Author and philosopher Nassim Taleb has described such systems as "anti-fragile." Fragile systems degrade when stressed, but anti-fragile systems grow stronger (up to a point). We discover that it's not wise to put our village too far from the river or we'll spend too much time and energy hauling water. Later we discover that it's not wise to put our village too close to the river because a flood will wipe us out. Each of these lessons - and an infinite number of others - were learned for us, the price being our ancestors' suffering and even death.

The development pattern that was used in North America through the late 1800s represents thousands of years of received wisdom on how to build human habitat. In no way was it perfect, but it's important to understand that perfection is not possible in a system with so many competing priorities and objectives.

What is attainable is a degree of stability, the harmonious balancing of multiple things simultaneously over time. Our habitat was optimized to us, and we to our habitat. The two co-evolved. Grasping that fact opened to me a world of spooky wisdom.

Spooky Wisdom

I had the opportunity to spend time in Italy during my mid-20s. Walking amid the ruins of Pompeii, I noted a little shop that had served as the fast food restaurant of its day. It was located on one of the direct paths from the core of the city to the edge, although it was closer to the outskirts than the center of the action.

The building was small: just two rooms. The room furthest from the street was the living quarters, closed at the back but with an opening to the front. The front room along the street was where the food was kept warm and dispensed out of pots placed under a countertop. The countertop ran along the sidewalk for ease of service.

As an engineer who had worked on site layout and project development for a handful of fast food restaurants, my initial reaction was: how quaint. Look at how these simple people lived. What a hard and miserable life. Thank goodness we are so much more intelligent and sophisticated today. Thank goodness we have risen above this.

In subsequent years, I would grow to realize how ignorant I had been.

With just two rooms, the family member who ran the fast food operation in front could also keep an eye on small kids in back, taking a break from sales when times were slow and being more attentive when they were not. Thus, half the household's parents could both create an income stream and care for young family members simultaneously.

This freed up the other half of the household, along with any extended family that lived under the roof, to get a job elsewhere, likely outside of the city doing some form of manual labor. Matthew 20: 1-16, in the New Testament, relays the Parable of the Workers, describing how people would line up in the marketplace to be selected for manual labor. This was a common arrangement of the day, with those selected earning a day's wages.

What this family had created was income diversity. If no labor was to be had that day, hopefully the restaurant would provide some fallback income. If the restaurant had a slow day, ideally it was because there were wages to be had laboring in vineyards. If both had a successful day, it allowed some savings to accrue for those times when both sources of income dried up.

A stretch of good fortune for both income streams would cause savings to grow into a nest egg, some real wealth that could be used to improve the family's situation. Maybe they used that wealth to expand the restaurant. Or to hire help, perhaps purchasing a slave culled from the ranks of a defeated enemy, which was common practice. Again, I'm not describing a utopia; I'm describing a complex system that imperfectly harmonizes many competing priorities simultaneously over time.

What is important is that the strategies emerging in...