Experiencing the modern city

Of all the things that have had a persistent tendency to surprise observers, cities have been among the most prolific. Then again, they’d better be for all their social and economic complexity, for their capacity to be the seed of so many perspectives on human development. We shape our cities, which then shape us, and we shape our cities again in return. Even social interactions that we have on the streets, even the decisions we make about whether or not we feel like a walk in the city have to do with how we let our cities communicate with us*.

This is the idea that The Human Scale, a documentary by the Danish filmmaker Andreas Dalsgaard, explores – mostly through a comparative analysis of architectural narratives at play in Chongqing, Copenhagen, New York, Siena and Dhaka, together with the work of the architect Jan Gehl and his colleagues. Its storytelling is patient and sympathetic, and does a good job of providing curated insights into how cities are failing humans today, and how we’re failing the solutions we’re conceiving in response. While it elucidates well the social character that future growth reforms must necessarily imbibe, it also refuses to accommodate the necessity of industrial growth.

What follows are a few thoughts based on notes I managed to take during the screening.

*

An immersive experience

I watched it at Nextbangalore Gatishil, the name given to a previously open lot on Rhenius Street then repurposed to host small meetings centered on urban studies. As the Nextbangalore website puts it,

The Nextbangalore Gatishil Space is an urban intervention on an unused space in Shantnagar. During nearly three weeks we provide a space to share your visions for Bangalore, to discuss your ideas, and to improve them in workshops, events and meetings. With an additional toolset, we want to explose [sic] a citizens vision for Bangalore.

Jute mats were laid on bare ground to make for seating space. A bunch of short tables occupied the center. The setup was rounded off by makeshift walls made of a plain-woven fabric, stretched on bamboo scaffolding, on which testimonials to Nextbangalore’s work by past attendees were printed. A cloth-roof was suspended more than 15 feet high. Including a seven-foot-high yellow wall facing the road, the Gatishil was only barely disparate.

What this has to do with The Human Scale is that the sound of traffic was a constant background, and made for an immersive watching experience. When Dalsgaard traveled to Chongqing to have Jan Gehl talk about developing countries’ tendency to mimic the West, he pointed his camera at the city’s domineering skyline and traffic-choked highways. Looking up from within the Gatishil, you could see the three flanking apartment buildings, one to a side, and hear the cars passing outside. There were a lot of mosquitoes that hinted at a stagnant pool of water in the vicinity. No stars were visible through a big gap in the roof.

The result was that you didn’t have to go to Chongqing to understand what Gehl was talking about. It was happening around you. Buildings were getting taller for lack of space, making it harder for the people on the highest floors to spontaneously decide to go for a walk outside. Roads were being built to move cars, not pedestrians, with narrow sidewalks, wide lanes and opulent bends demanding longer travel-times for shorter distances. After you finally leave for home from work, you reach after dark and the kids are already late for bed. Live life like this for years on end and you – the city-dweller – learn not to blame the city even as the city-planners get tunnel-vision and forget how walking is different from driving.

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Data doesn’t mean quantitative

One of the problems addressed in The Human Scale is our reluctance to develop new kinds of solutions for evolving problems. David Sim, of Gehl Architects, suggests at one point that it’s not about having one vision or a master-plan but about evolving a solution and letting people experience the changes as they’re implemented in stages.

A notable aspect of this philosophy is surveying: about observing whatever it is that people are doing in different places and then installing those settings that will encourage them to do more of what they already do a lot of. As another architect, Lars Gemzøe, put it: if you build more roads, there will be more cars; if you build more parks, there will be more people on picnics. And you built more parks if the people wanted more parks.

Gehl’s approach testifies to the importance of data-taking when architects want to translate populism to designing the perfect ‘social city’. In the beginning of the documentary, he decries the modernism of Le Corbusier and the contrived aspirations it seeded, including encouraging designs to be machine-like, using materials for their appearance rather than mechanical properties, the elimination of lavishness in appearance, and almost always requiring a rectilinear arrangement of surfaces.

Instead, he calls for retaining only one of its tenets – ‘form follows function’ – and retooling the rest to cater not to aesthetic appeal but social necessities. There are two interesting examples to illustrate this. The first is when deciding where to place a sunshade so that it becomes a small meeting-spot on lazy Sunday afternoons, or when building a balcony at the right place so that passersby find a place to sit when they’re looking for places to sit. The second is about building longitudinal highways in oblong cities but then also paving the way for latitudinal walkways crisscrossing the shorter breadths of the city.

Corbusier – and others like him – heralded a school of design that did not account for the people who would use the building. In effect, its practice was more-personal in that it celebrated the architect – his work – and not the consequence of his work, at a time when technological changes such as mass-manufacturing had the personal under threat. On the other hand, the more-personal populism – which aimed at honing social interactions – banked on the less-subjective character of surveying and statistical analysis to eliminate the architect’s aspirations from the designing process.

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The question of modernity

Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, was the only ‘developing city’ addressed in The Human Scale. And being a developing city, its government’s plan for it was obvious: development. But in pursuing the West as a model for development, the documentary focuses on how the city’s planners were also inadvertently pursuing the West as a model for flaws in urban-planning – but with an important difference. The Occident had urbanized and developed simultaneously; in the Subcontinent, urbanization was more like a rash on an underdeveloped landscape. In this context, Bangladeshi activist Ruhan Shama asks: “What does it mean to be modern?” The question is left unanswered, sadly.

Anyway, David Sim calls the imitative approach taking the ‘helicopter perspective’ – that we’ve been building things because we can without knowing what we really want. The result has been one of large-scale irony. According to Gehl and his supporters, today’s cities have coerced their inhabitants into a life of social austerity, driving even neighbors away from each other. But the cities themselves – for example, the Northeast and Taiheiyō megalopolises – and their corresponding metropolitan areas have started to move into each other’s spaces, not encroaching as much as overlapping. The Northeast Megalopolis in that region of the United States is a great example, with Boston, New York City, Philadelphia and Washington already starting to merge. If anything, such dualisms (notably in the guise of Zipf’s law) have been the character of urban modernism.

 

*Much like Ernst Mach’s once-provocative idea that local inertial frames are influenced by the large-scale distribution of matter in the universe.

How big is your language?

This blog post first appeared, as written by me, on The Copernican science blog on December 20, 2012.

zipff

It all starts with Zipf’s law. Ever heard of it? It’s a devious little thing, especially when you apply it to languages.

Zipf’s law states that the chances of finding a word of a language in all the texts written in that language are inversely proportional to the word’s rank in the frequency table. In other words, this means that the chances of finding the most frequent word is twice as much as are chances of finding the second most frequent word, thrice as much as are chances of finding the third most frequent word, and so on.

Unfortunately (only because I like how “Zipf” sounds), the law holds only until about the 1,000th most common word; after this point, a logarithmic plot drawn between frequency and chance stops being linear and starts to curve.

The importance of this break is that if Zipf’s law fails to hold for a large corpus of words, then the language, at some point, must be making some sort of distinction between common and exotic words, and its need for new words must either be increasing or decreasing. This is because, if the need remained constant, then the distinction would be impossible to define except empirically and never conclusively – going against the behaviour of Zipf’s law.

Consequently, the chances of finding the 10,000th word won’t be 10,000 times less than the chances of finding the most frequently used word but a value much lesser or much greater.

A language’s diktat

Analysing each possibility, i.e., if the chances of finding the 10,000th-most-used word are NOT 10,000 times less than the chances of finding the most-used word but…

  • Greater (i.e., The Asymptote): The language must have a long tail, also called an asymptote. Think about it. If the rarer words are all used almost as frequently as each other, then they can all be bunched up into one set, and when plotted, they’d form a straight line almost parallel to the x-axis (chance), a sort of tail attached to the rest of the plot.
  • Lesser (i.e., The Cliff): After expanding to include a sufficiently large vocabulary, the language could be thought to “drop off” the edge of a statistical cliff. That is, at some point, there will be words that exist and mean something, but will almost never be used because syntactically simpler synonyms exist. In other words, in comparison to the usage of the first 1,000 words of the language, the (hypothetical) 10,000th word would be used negligibly.

The former possibility is more likely – that the chances of finding the 10,000th-most-used word would not be as low as 10,000-times less than the chances of encountering the most-used word.

As a language expands to include more words, it is likely that it issues a diktat to those words: “either be meaningful or go away”. And as the length of the language’s tail grows, as more exotic and infrequently used words accumulate, the need for those words drops off faster over time that are farther from Zipf’s domain.

Another way to quantify this phenomenon is through semantics (and this is a far shorter route of argument): As the underlying correlations between different words become more networked – for instance, attain greater betweenness – the need for new words is reduced.

Of course, the counterargument here is that there is no evidence to establish if people are likelier to use existing syntax to encapsulate new meaning than they are to use new syntax. This apparent barrier can be resolved by what is called the principle of least effort.

Proof and consequence

While all of this has been theoretically laid out, there had to have been many proofs over the years because the object under observation is a language – a veritable projection of the right to expression as well as a living, changing entity. And in the pursuit of some proof, on December 12, I spotted a paper on arXiv that claims to have used an “unprecedented” corpus (Nature scientific report here).

Titled “Languages cool as they expand: Allometric scaling and the decreasing need for new words”, it was hard to miss in the midst of papers, for example, being called “Trivial symmetries in a 3D topological torsion model of gravity”.

The abstract of the paper, by Alexander Petersen from the IMT Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies, et al, has this line: “Using corpora of unprecedented size, we test the allometric scaling of growing languages to demonstrate a decreasing marginal need for new words…” This is what caught my eye.

While it’s clear that Petersen’s results have been established only empirically, that their corpus includes all the words in books written with the English language between 1800 and 2008 indicates that the set of observables is almost as large as it can get.

Second: When speaking of corpuses, or corpora, the study has also factored in Heaps’ law (apart from Zipf’s law), and found that there are some words that obey neither Zipf nor Heaps but are distinct enough to constitute a class of their own. This is also why I underlined the word common earlier in this post. (How Petersen, et al, came to identify this is interesting: They observed deviations in the lexicon of individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia!)

The Heaps’ law, also called the Heaps-Herdan law, states that the chances of discovering a new word in one large instance-text, like one article or one book, become lesser as the size of the instance-text grows. It’s like a combination of the sunk-cost fallacy and Zipf’s law.

It’s a really simple law, too, and makes a lot of sense even intuitively, but the ease with which it’s been captured statistically is what makes the Heaps-Herdan law so wondrous.

The sub-linear Heaps' law plot: Instance-text size on x-axis; Number of individual words on y-axis.
The sub-linear Heaps’ law plot: Instance-text size on x-axis; Number of individual words on y-axis.

Falling empires

And Petersen and his team establish in the paper that, extending the consequences of Zipf’s and Heaps’ laws to massive corpora, the larger a language is in terms of the number of individual words it contains, the slower it will grow, the lesser cultural evolution it will engender. In the words of the authors: “… We find a scaling relation that indicates a decreasing ‘marginal need’ for new words which are the manifestations of cultural evolution and the seeds for language growth.”

However, for the class of “distinguished” words, there seems to exist a power law – one that results in a non-linear graph unlike Zipf’s and Heaps’ laws. This means that as new exotic words are added to a language, the need for them, as such, is unpredictable and changes over time for as long as they are away from the Zipf’s law’s domain.

All in all, languages eventually seem an uncanny mirror of empires: The larger they get, the slower they grow, the more intricate the exchanges become within it, the fewer reasons there are to change, until some fluctuations are injected from the world outside (in the form of new words).

In fact, the mirroring is not so uncanny considering both empires and languages are strongly associated with cultural evolution. Ironically enough, it is the possibility of cultural evolution that very meaningfully justifies the creation and employment of languages, which means that at some point, languages only become bloated in some way to stop germination of new ideas and instead start to suffocate such initiatives.

Does this mean the extent to which a culture centered on a language has developed and will develop depends on how much the language itself has developed and will develop? Not conclusively – as there are a host of other factors left to be integrated – but it seems a strong correlation exists between the two.

So… how big is your language?