Abstract
Based on their research showing that growing cities follow basic principles, two theoretical physicists, Luis Bettencourt and Geoffrey West, call for researchers and professionals to contribute to a grand theory of urban sustainability. In their research, they develop a ‘science of the city’ to help urban planners address problems that arise from population increases. Although they provide valuable insights for understanding urban sustainability issues, they do not give planners a manageable way to approach such problems. I argue that developing an applied mereology to understand the concept of ‘city identity’ gives planners a theoretical device for addressing urban affairs, including ethical concerns. In turn, I devise a model of city identity to show how a ‘philosophy of the city’ contributes to a grand theory of urban sustainability.
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Notes
My claims about city identity entail that a city only has one identity, but due to the social and political conditions that govern how people come to know a city’s identity, people will describe the same city in several different ways. This topic, along with the kind of pluralism that Iris Marion Young exposed, presents challenges for a model of city identity. However, properly addressing such challenges is beyond the scope of this paper. For more information, see: Young (1990). Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
This account of a city’s parts is not exhaustive. There are other issues that deal with boundaries, smaller parts that compose larger parts, overlapping parts, and so on. The point here is to illustrate how the basic structure of mereology provides planners with an alternative approach for thinking about how a city fits together.
One might think that a high frequency of successful exchanges between parts shows that a city has a strong meta-structure. While this point is worth examining, frequency becomes irrelevant in the face of certain failures. Consider, for example, if a bridge where to collapse. The frequency of successful exchange involving the bridge could be in the millions, yet one failure could significantly impact several other parts, weakening the meta-structure.
It is worth pointing out that congruence does not necessarily entail justice. For example, in certain societies, there can be a high degree of congruence between parts, but there is also injustice. This reason is why I focused on failures in the previous section. Injustice counts as a failure, a condition that could nullify appeals to congruence.
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Epting, S. An Applied Mereology of the City: Unifying Science and Philosophy for Urban Planning. Sci Eng Ethics 22, 1361–1374 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-015-9696-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-015-9696-3