Metaphorical Reasoning
To learn using
metaphors, take a system you understand and fit it into a complicated natural
system. For example, you notice that
the organization of a city is similar to a person's blood vessels. The streets are the vessels. The buildings are the cells. The cars are the blood cells.
Once you have the
foundation laid, look for components in either system that haven't been matched
up yet. Often you'll discover a
component in one system that leads you to discover for the first time the
matching component in the other system.
The blood system has white blood cells.
These correspond to police vehicles and tow trucks, and like white blood
cells they are usually travelling along with the rest of the cars in case they
are needed. The people in the cars are
the oxygen and other materials that the blood cells carry to the cells.
You may also
notice things that don't match up but that'll still lead to learning about the
two systems. For example, while cities
have traffic lights, two-way streets, and criss-crossing traffic, the blood
system doesn't really have equivalents of these. Why is that? It's because
the task of the blood system is to move objects along a known path from the
lungs, to the heart, and through a capillary somewhere and back. A city's streets on the other hand must
transfer cars from any arbitrary point in the city to any other arbitrary
point. So, you've come to an abstract
understanding of the task that each system solves. Based on that, you realize that the roads in most airports and
fast-food drive throughs are more like that of the a blood system because their
task is more linear and set.
Another metaphor
is the way that cities are much like the non-vascular plants that grow flat on
the surface of rocks and other things.
Originally, there were only non-vascular plants, that could only grow to
be about an inch tall because they had no central vascular system that could
pump materials higher. Probably due to
overcrowding, plants evolved to vascular forms that had a long stem that led to
leaves and other things at the top, higher up in the sunlight.
So, we could say
that most of a city is like a non-vascular plant in that it is constrained to
grow on the surface and in two dimensions.
Sky rises are more like vascular plants and are only viable because of
their extensive elevator systems, the city equivalent of the vascular
tube. A development we haven't seen yet
but can expect in cities is high-rises that lead to a large top that overhangs
the rest of the city, like a mushroom. We haven't seen this yet for legal
reasons of who's "on" what land, perceived safety reasons, and
because these "mushroom" buildings would block out the Sun for other
buildings most of the day.
Another future
development that would model plants' evolution would be extensive multi-tiered
city streets. Rather than coping with
traffic by making streets wider, cities will eventually be forced to make
streets have multiple layers with many access lanes that lead between the
layers. This would be similar to the
cell layering that many advanced non-vascular plants have.
John LeFlohic
February 10, 2003