9 August

In historical terms, many urban environments are remarkably peaceful and functional. Not utopian, not without issues, but compared to human history as a whole modern cities are very livable environments. We often attribute this to democratic governance. But the people who live in the ordinary streets in cities often don’t even know one another, and do little or nothing together. I think something else is in play, something that makes a city look recognisably like an urban environment too. The material infrastructure of a city is what creates successful and enduring human societies. This infrastructure is sometimes called ‘services’, the provision of water and electricty and communications and food etc. to humans, as well as connecting them to regulatory planning arrangements. And is seen as enabling, rather than central to the culture itself. I think those connections create something that is the key to how it all holds together. They create what I call a ‘social field’, similar to a magnetic field. Not an analogy or metaphor, an actual, physical set of interactive forces and relationships. Every infrastructural ‘service’ also links a household to the entire social ‘grid’ of the nation. It’s an energy and information grid as well as a provider of material goods. The energy and information that flows through this wider social grid - through the social field - negotiates in real-time, all day and night, the relationship between that household and the wider society. By plugging in to this social field, by having all the services connected, a household is both constrained and enabled in a huge variety of ways to participate in the collective life not just of their street, but of the nation as a whole. And none of it needs much if any human-human interaction with their neighbours or others at all. The social field created by this wider social grid calculates and enables that relationship every moment, and collapses the distinction between local and global.