An evolutionary complex systems perspective on urban health

Deliberations about how to govern complex problems of urban health and wellbeing sustainably have often been implicitly biased by ideas such as being ‘human-scale’ or ‘people-centered.’ With increasing urban populations and increasing urban system interconnectivity, many cities have transformed into city regions or clusters, and the external effects of urban growth are carried mainly by the marginalized and the environment putting urban health increasingly at risk. Here we address the question of why human societies have not been better at collectively adapting to the challenges of urbanization and global environmental change? We build a theoretical framework of multi-level selection, complex systems evolution, and governance, following which we then present ‘human-scale’ and ‘people-centered’ ideas of urban development as expressions of two types of socio-political organization with different degrees of self-organization. We found several reasons for which the maladies of current urban development emerged and the seeming inability to resolve them. First, urban systems became increasingly interconnected and evolved into ultrasocial superorganisms, displaying preference to sustain themselves as a whole rather than their subordinates. Second, the difference in scaling effects between the biological and the social network contributed to the mismatch between rapid urban growth and slow adaptation. Furthermore, institutions of decreased variety reinforce themselves and become dominant, creating a positive feedback mechanism and promoting invasive and exploitative exponential growth, but they also reduce the creativity and resilience of urban systems. We also found that both the “human-scale” and the “people-centered” approaches acknowledge the exponential growth and decreasing variety in urban systems, and advocate for correcting the mismatches. To incorporate people's needs and values for long-term, truly sustainable urban health governance, we recommend combining the self-organizing, evolutionary feature of “human-scale” and the coordinative, political feature of “people-centeredness.”     

医院文化建设的关键是以人为本

医院文化作为企业文化延伸而来的一种新的管理理念,是一种高层次的管理方法,它既是医院在长期建设和管理中所创造的具有本院特色的精神财富,又是强调以人为本,有效强化团队精神的集中体现,从而提高医院核心竞争力。     

城市社区安全新建构——基于杭州市社区民防体系的思考

安全是现代城市的重要公共产品,社区是现代城市管理的基本单元,社区公共安全产品的供应能力是衡量现代城市建设水平的关键指标之一。当前各种复合性灾害、危机与风险使得社区安全面临愈加严峻的考验,加强社区民众防护工作日益紧迫。社区民防是个全新课题,构成了当前城市安全建设的新路径。杭州市社区民防探索经验,为城市安全目标指引下进一步深化社区安全建设提供了新的对策思考。