In his last book 'Disintegration' , geo-political expert Andrei Martyanov described an interesting conversation. He wrote:
"Few years ago, when having a conversation with one of the former combat pilots from Russian Air Force - RuAF Officer Schools are 5 years, 6 days a week academies, same as Russian naval academies - he complained that throughout his career he never for once needed the course in Differential Equations he had to take while in the academy.
The response from the group was unanimous -- they did not teach you to use Differential Equations everyday, they taught you to develop complex synaptic connections which are applicable for everyday life, including combat flying."
These lines made a strong impression on me, because they matched exactly my own experience when I first started writing scripts for solving planning tasks and then explored the applications of mathematical methods in urban planning. It is not that I particularly wanted to. My interest, experience and skills all lay in qualitative and community participation methods.
The need for that came from the real experience of having to deal with projects of the size and complexity which simply could not be tackled with qualitative and community participation methods.
The most important benefit of using these techniques is not their direct effectiveness in solving planning tasks (important as that is), but the effect that their use has on the way in which we conceptualise and approach the problems that we wish to solve.
They increase our ability to articulate complex problems clearly.
It's quite like the skills that one acquires on attending a theatre workshop. It is not important that the person actually acts in a play on stage. But the skills of communication, role-playing, improvisation, expression, dealing with an audience etc, all make a huge contribution to our day to day performance in our own professions - whatever they may be.
The benefit is indirect - and crucial. They develop synaptic connections.
Exactly, like what was said by the friends of the combat pilot, the important thing is not whether mathematical methods are being used everyday to solve all kinds of planning problems, but the familiarity with the application of algebra, calculus etc to planning problems enables us to think about the problem quite differently than if we were totally ignorant of them.
How and why does that happen ?
In the last two posts we discussed the variables that effect the simple act of people going from one location within a city or a region to another location. We saw that this act of "going" is directly related to the number of people at the origin and the number of "attractors" (e.g. number of shops) at the destination; and inversely related to some power of the distance (physical distance or other barriers such as time, money etc) in between the two locations.
But what if we turn this problem from a relatively simple one of movement between two points to a movement between many many points ?
This is exactly the point when the practitioner trained only in qualitative skills ends up using the power of language to describe how overwhelmingly complex urban problems are. The solution to tackle that complexity is generally an open-ended call for more discussion, consultation, capacity building, participation.....and -- increasingly in present times -- for more data, as if all these processes would somehow magically resolve the problem.
However, a practitioner with a more holistic education and training, would be able to do something far more powerful -- combine communication and consultation with matrix algebra !
If there are 20 zones within a city, then our holistic planner would make a table with 20 rows (referring to origins) and 20 columns (referring to destinations), thereby creating a "map" of numbers to describe the movement between these locations.
A more general way would be to use a variable instead of a fixed number, and say n points...instead of 10 or 20 or 50 points.
We essentially gave ourselves a highly effective "tool" that helps us to study multiple interactions using something as simple as a table with a certain number of rows and columns. Armed with this tool we are able to make far more solid and meaningful points in any community consultation process on urban mobility that we may attend.
While the equation described in the previous two articles helped us to imagine the variables affecting movement clearly; the matrix helps us to imagine the interaction between multiple locations clearly.
We start moving away from vagueness and confusion; and towards clarity and focus.
Similarly, when we try to algorithmise a planning task by writing a computer script, we are forced to think very clearly about the sequence of individual tasks that an overall complex problem can be broken down too.
It is not important whether the problem gets solved by the algorithm itself or not. But the very process of creating the algorithm gives us greater command over the problem we are facing.
The same can be said about powerful techniques of Operations Research such as linear programming. Whether we can apply it to all kinds of planning problems or not, linear programming helps us to internalise a fundamental characteristic of real planning -- the need to maximise or minimise an objective subject to a multitude of constraints.
This is extremely important, because most of this time, in complex professions like urban planning, we are not in the business of achieving a goal in totality. Most of the time we trying to optimise the situation by maximising a desirable outcome and minimising an undesirable one. And all the while we are having to do this in a context of various kinds of constraints and limitations.
Often, we hear planning professionals complain about the impossibility of achieving the goals set by their profession given the tremendous limitations of resources, time, capacities etc. A planner who has internalised the science of linear programming would not complain about such a situation, because to such a professional these would be the essential and "normal" attributes of the job that he or she is trained to do.
Does a fisherman grumble because the fish are in the water and they swim from one point to another ?
And does it not make sense, then, to continue to learn the art and science of "fishing" ?
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