Cities as collective brains
Avel GUÉNIN--CARLUT · OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2020
The aim of my PhD project is to developp a rigorous conceptual and methodological framework to study future urban societies. My demarch is based on two complementary components : first, understanding what dynamics have historically driven the development of cities ; second, characterising cities as culturally evolved cognitive agents. Studying these two axis will allow me to assess whether cities are in fact "collective brains", in the sense that they are pseudo-organisms evolved as catalysers for the human ability to cultural adaptation. As I relate formally the evolution of cities to the cumulative culture literature, I will be able to make meaningful predictions regarding the plausible trajectories of urban societies in the near future. This demarch is firmly anchored in the discipline of cultural evolution, or the study of how and why human culture changes over time. More particularly, I build on recent work regarding the effect of structured population networks on cultural adaptation so as to assess how the cultural niche of cities accelerated the rate of cultural evolution through network recombination. Morphological or sociological "city traits" associated to this acceleration can consequently be tested for statistical marks of selection. If these marks exist, the city could be said to be culturally "evolved so as to" accelerate cultural adaptation, and it is likely that this dynamic is still key to its contemporary behaviour (as is indeed empirically afferent). A complimentary axis of study will be associated to the embodied cognition literature, as it will consider whether cities are driven by aggregated individual cognition or show instead a significant degree of cognitive autonomy in regard to lower levels of analysis. While the notion of cities as "collective brains" may seem trivially refuted on a purely intuitive perspective, it is on the contrary scientifically sound as a wide array of scientist consider cultural evolution exist autonomously from individual properties in the same sense that a brain enacts complex behaviour in autonomy from each of its individual cells. In each case, the individual level work mainly as a support or enabler, and self-organisation at a population level appear to be the relevant scale for articulating prediction of collective behaviour. This work will adress central conceptual issues in the cultural evolution litterature by questioning the strict distinction between "culture" and "cognition" supposed in mainstream research. The present project will indeed formalise precisely why, just as human cognition may drive some instances of cultural evolution, it could be in return cultural evolution that drives some instances of human cognition. In addition, it will further our prospective ability to understand future societies by grounding the evolutionary module of cities as capital to the ability to cultural change, and robust to socio-economical fluctuations due to its material and social structure. This will help establish the city as relevant scale for implementing sustainability policies, as they are the key scale for implementing "socio-cultural resilience" - ie the ability for a society to maintain cooperation and adaptive culture.