Something tells me that most of you live in cities. Do you know much about them?

Now it’s fashionable to talk about cities as living, evolving systems. The beginning of this phenomenon was the creation of the theory of self-organization of systems - synergetics - at the end of the 20th century. In its terms, the city is called an “open dynamic dissipative system”, and you can build its model - “an object illustrating the dependence of form transformations on changing content” and describe “internal structural transformations taking into account the possibility of indefinite system behavior over time”. All of the graphs, tables and algorithms in an unspoiled person cause a normal defensive reaction of numbness. But not everything is so hopeless.

Under the cut, there will be several bionic analogies that will allow you to take a side view of the city and understand how it lives, how it develops, moves, gets sick and dies. So let's not waste time and deal with the dismemberment.

In addition to mathematical, cognitive and formal models, there is also such a technique as analogy, which has been used by man for many thousands of years and has established itself well to simplify understanding. Of course, making forecasts based on analogies is bad, but you can track the dynamics of the process: in every self-respecting system there are energy sources, ways of its transmission, points of use, growth vectors, and so on. The first attempts to apply the concept of bionics to urban planning dates back to the 1930s, but they did not get much development then, since there is no complete analogy of the city in wildlife (if it were, it would be really strange). But certain aspects of the “physiology” of the city have good correspondences. No matter how much I want to flatter the city, it basically behaves like a unicellular, lichen, colony of microorganisms or multicellular animal a little more complicated than a sponge.

Architects distinguish many structures and subsystems in the city’s structure, each with its own name, many of which you may have encountered as a transport system or housing structure, but you probably haven’t heard of others, for example, about a visual frame or mental map. However, each element has its own clear functional purpose.

Skeleton

The very first thing you come across when anatomizing any settlement is its frame of axes-bones and knots-joints. This is what gives shape and guides development from the first days. Each individual cell has a framework; without it, no processes can be properly organized, therefore it is logical that the megalopolis and the most seedy village itself have it. Firstly, these are the main roads oriented to neighboring settlements. The city will want to stretch along them and they will become the most stable, unchanged lines on the plan for centuries. Secondly, the skeleton includes obstacles: rivers, lakes, swamps, ravines and other geographical inconveniences that stop growth, squeezing the growing settlement, like an outer shell. On the other hand, it was precisely such elements that often served as a defense for the citadels of medieval cities, and the governing bodies gravitated towards them, so that some forms of relief can be called with good conscience the bones of the skull that hide the brain.

If a set of these parameters has already been set, you can predict the shape of the settlement in the future and how the network of smaller roads will develop, on which the meat and entrails will grow. And if in the old cities everything worked by itself, then in Soviet times, when compiling master plans for new cities, the authors of the projects had to move their brains, combining (not always successfully) the natural tendencies and dictates of the party leadership.

What can be learned from this:

• The skeleton must be connected, new elements always join the old ones - if the city has problems with the connectivity of the road network, it will have problems with growth and economic stability.
• The surrounding tissues at the joints joints have a complex and peculiar structure - street intersections attract trade, services, pedestrian network nodes and vice versa “squeeze” ordinary housing.
• An organism with a large number of shell-type elements either stops in development and growth, or is forced to destroy them - the key moment in the development of a huge number of cities is the transition to the other side of the river or draining of the swamp, and if the resources for such a mega-project are not enough, the city may be in stagnation for centuries, without increasing territory and not increasing its economic importance;
• It is advantageous to lay the main blood vessels along the elements of the skeleton, since they are most unchanged in time - roads and utilities gravitate towards each other for a reason, but more on that below.

Minced meat

The meat is muscle and fat, and in the cells of the cytoplasm it is such a thing that surrounds the bones, forming the bulk of the body of a living creature, accumulates and gives up resources, provides movement and determines overall vitality. For the city, this of course is what architects call “urban fabric”, “filling” and other boring words: ordinary neighborhoods, mostly residential.

As any creature builds up mass at every opportunity, the city, with improved supplies, begins to attract more people and build new sleeping areas, even if it cannot always provide these “internal migrants” with a normal standard of living and work. Low-rise areas are pleasant, but ineffective - this is fat, weakly penetrated by blood vessels and containing cells that are of little use to the body.

What can be learned from this:

• Muscles tend to be evenly spaced along the skeleton; on a thicker bone, a thicker layer of muscles. Residential areas will behave the same: near larger highways, population density will be higher than near minor highways.
• If a muscle is poorly supplied with blood, it dies away - areas with poor transport accessibility grow more slowly than others, housing in them is cheaper and not being repaired, the population is gradually marginalized.
• If lumps of fat turn out to be squeezed from all sides by muscles (and low-rise old areas are high-rise), we can get “inflammation”, which will lead either to the disappearance of this type of building (then consider that we just temporarily reserved this volume), or to the transformation of the entire surrounding area into a “gangster” or to the transformation of buildings into an elite, raised and fenced quarter - this is a kind of “cyst”.
• If the body grows fat on the surface (and the city around the perimeter), it becomes difficult for him to drag so much ineffective tissue, he suffocates, blood vessels expand and clog up with blood clots, and internal organs experience disproportionate stress and failures. All the charms of suburbanization as they are: traffic jams, the inability to easily get to work and infrastructure, loading the central infrastructure is several times stronger than the calculated one, dying off social ties and so on.

This city is developing in a spiral. It is immediately clear that it arose naturally, and was not built from scratch.

Circulatory system

Each process requires resources. For the city, these are people, goods, water, energy, information and time. The circulatory system redistributes resources between organs. The transport system of the city is engaged in people and goods, and engineering networks are in charge of energy and information. Transporting energy over long distances is not always profitable, so raw materials can be transported for its production, as glucose is delivered to mitochondria.

Engineering networks of all kinds are usually grouped with traffic arteries for several reasons: firstly, they are brought to new areas at the same time and it is unprofitable to conduct work in two places; secondly, as already mentioned, this is an island of stability, “buried and forgot”, and tomorrow a skyscraper will not grow here; thirdly, there is an opportunity to save on the “vessel shell” by building common protective and engineering structures-collectors; fourthly, it is important to save space on the indentation, because there are zones and elements that can be adjacent, while others are harmful to each other.

What can be learned from this:

• Wide vessels carry blood over long distances, so there is less resistance, but on the periphery they branch and the speed decreases.
• Muscles are supplied with blood through a network of small vessels, uniformity of supply is important here, and large ones go to vital organs.
• Blood not only brings resources, but also diverts spent ones, therefore sewage systems obey the same laws.
• If basic communications have already been brought to the area, it begins to grow very quickly and efficiently. The spiral growth of the city is widespread: each subsequent district adjoins the previous and the old buildings, while large-scale work is usually not carried out simultaneously in two places (in large modern cities there may be several such “growth points”, for example, by the number of districts, then the spiral turns out not so noticeable).

Nervous system

The nervous system consists of nodes that process data and send signals and signal transmission paths. Since our information went according to the column “resources”, it means that this is not about the Internet. This is about management. And I have sad news for you: cities are very primitive organisms, and they are managed very poorly. Master plans are not executed, the real situation does not correspond to the administration’s data, control signals often do not reach or work in a bizarre manner, the reaction to any changes is always late.

But completely without control it’s also bad to live in changing conditions, therefore the city is usually divided into areas subject to local “ganglia”, which have a chance to have time to correct something and prevent the situation from reaching a dead end (the sacral “back” brain of large dinosaurs confirms it works). Moreover, if the administrative division was performed without taking into account the specifics of the skeleton, muscle tissue and the circulatory system, the body will act and develop in a non-optimal way. Life example: the city divides the river into northern and southern halves, and administrative districts into eastern and western parts. As a result, we have a division into quarters and the constant need for coordination between the two administrations.

By the way, now the Russian Federation is going through a difficult period of changing the system of hard-drawn “general plans”, which basically worked poorly, to a system of flexible strategies - “master plans”, with which so far few people even understand what to do. Therefore, my crystal ball predicts: do not even expect stable and logical urban development in the coming years.

What can be learned from this:

• Large cities do not balance the needs and prospects of their areas. Funds are distributed unevenly and irrationally. Presumably, the master plan will be able to deal with the problem, “but this is not accurate” (c).
• Cities with over 400 thousand inhabitants were recognized as self-governing systems in Soviet times, so if you live in one of these, just don’t look for logic on a scale of more than a few kilometers. To implement a project that affects several districts at once, huge funds and a powerful administrative resource are needed, and still someone will screw up, and the last kilometer of the ring road will be built for ten years ..
• In the zones at the junction of the districts, all kinds of strange game is often happening, they can even “substitute” each other, for example, by building a large building where a road important for another district could pass.

This city is well divided in half. The main thing is not to confuse how.

Digestive system

What happens to resources flowing into the city? They are either processed beyond recognition or finely divided and distributed throughout the body using the circulatory system. As fatty acids in the liver turn into acetoacetic acid, the bulk of which is used outside the liver, in various tissues and organs, so food and goods from storage areas are transported throughout the city. In industrial complexes, various transformations take place, but the same thing happens invariably with the results: they are used to maintain the vitality of the body. Not all residents directly go to it, there are both construction and transport sectors aimed at growth (they can be compared with protein metabolism, and everyday goods - with carbohydrate).

What can be learned from this:

• The digestive system is very closely connected with the excretory and cannot function without it.
• Industrial zones need a lot of resources (including people) and energy. Large arteries are expensive, therefore their use is rational for several similar processes. This leads to clustering according to the transport principle.
• Resource processing is often a phased process, and the metabolite of one process is the source material for another. This creates clustering according to the “combine" principle of successive stages.
• Large organs are connected with the body at only a few points, therefore, for other tissues, they play the role of barriers in the blood supply. This dictates the specific location of industrial zones in the city. Cities that have outgrown their scheme need an emergency “abdominal operation” - removal of industrial zones and reprofiling of territories. By the way, many unique projects are connected with this in various cities of the world. For example, the fisted British staged a global reconstruction of the port and storage areas of London under the guise of preparation for the Olympics.

Excretory system

Without a sewage system, there is no civilization; everyone knows this. In the body, two organs filter the blood from harmful substances: the liver and kidneys (the number of kidneys in organisms is different, so we won’t go deeper). The kidneys remove what they can in an unchanged form, and the liver converts waste (sometimes into more dangerous metabolites). The intestine carries out simply unused resources, in our analogy it is the removal of solid waste to landfills. The sewer system acts as a kidney (unless you have methane tanks that convert waste into energy). Garbage processing, waste incineration plants and methane tanks perform the function of the liver.

What can be learned from this:

• Recycled waste can be more toxic than unrecycled waste, like methyl alcohol, which is metabolized by alcohol dehydrogenase in the liver to formaldehyde and formic acid. Hi-hi, incinerators, I see you.
• Waste can be a valuable resource. After intense physical work, the lactate formed during anaerobic glycolysis in skeletal muscle returns to the liver and turns there into glucose, which again enters the muscles. If the city begins to recycle its garbage and use the resulting products within itself, this is very cool both in terms of saving raw materials and in terms of logistics.
• Poorly organized waste management and storage can poison entire regions, remember the protests against landfills, “aromas” from filtering fields and incinerators, “battles” of residents and management companies over solid household waste. Naturally, housing in areas with such problems will depreciate, turn into rented one, attract low-income, poorly educated and not very decent citizens who will further worsen its image. Ghettoization is a positive feedback process, and completely different factors can trigger it.

In fact, this article is far from exhaustive and, moreover, does not claim to be scientifically accurate. I’ll talk about the growth of cities, their movement, diseases, digestion of space and other “physiological processes” some other time, so as not to bring everything together. If you have something to supplement or questions have arisen - I am waiting for your comments. Thank you for reading, I hope it was not boring.