PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

11. FORECASTING DESTINY
In the beginning of the twentieth century the area consisted mostly of
two towns, Athens and Piraeus, plus a number of minor villages. It grew
as masses drifted in from all over the country and occupied makeshift
housing on the town’s perimeter. From time to time the city limits
would expand to include the new inhabitants. No city planning was ever
attempted, which is obvious from a bird’s-eye view. Nevertheless, the
city functions, accommodates hordes of tourists, and remains a favorite
place for the majority of Athenians, a fact that motivated the Athens
Institute of Ekistics (studies of human settlement) to carry out a major
study on this apparently chaotic form of community development.
The researchers documented and classified all the services provided
by the city (taverns, movies, grocery shops, railroad stations, opera
house, and so forth). In so doing they discovered within the city as a
whole a structure of many small communities defined by the common
use of most basic facilities. They also discovered that the total personkilometers
for each one of these communities was about the same. If
population density increased in one community—and consequently the
total person-kilometers—new facilities were created and the community
split into two. The balance at any time was between “paying” for traveling
and paying for creating new facilities. It was all done in such a way
as to optimize the expenditure of energy, the biological equivalent for
money.
Obviously for facilities used rarely (such as a theater, swimming
pool, and park), one would be willing to walk further; these types of
services were present in only one out of seven communities, but also
serviced the six closest ones. This hierarchy continued upward, so that
for services used even more rarely (such as a stadium, concert hall, and
museum) one would have to travel even further, and more communities
would share the same facilities. Interestingly, the ratio seven was maintained
between hierarchical levels. Furthermore, the study identified a
total of five such hierarchical levels nested like Russian dolls.
A question addressed by J. Virirakis 10 was how well did such a
structure optimized energy expenditure at the city level, five hierarchical
levels higher than where it was first detected. He wrote a computer
program to calculate energy expenditure and ran it for different configurations
of the distribution of services. The simplest configuration—
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