The City as a System
I’m kicking off City Scenes with a three-part series that covers a few foundational themes on how I think about cities: systems, storytelling and community.
Even though this is a Substack called “City Scenes” (where I zoom in on a specific event or attribute of a city) I’m kicking off with a much broader concept: systems thinking. For me, the point of pulling on an individual thread is to discover how it’s woven into the larger tapestry.
In Thinking in Systems, Donella Meadows defines a system as “a set of things interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time.” Systems thinking takes a holistic approach, looking at the complex, interconnected whole rather than its isolated parts. Everything is connected; there are systems nested within systems, entangled and interconnected to other systems, all with intricate feedback loops.
Cities are the ultimate system of systems. The hard infrastructure, a network of transport links, electricity, water, broadband and more, keeps the city running while the density, proximity and flow of people and ideas fosters innovation, connection and culture. Economic systems are formed, attracting complementary industries and suppliers that create the workforce, supply chains and innovations that in turn attract even more like-minded companies and talent. Cities create their own self-reinforcing ecosystems that are difficult to replicate in other places.
While this entanglement can create a virtuous web of connection and innovation, it also means that cities face a snarl of complex challenges. Our most intractable issues — climate change, poverty, healthcare, housing, crime — are systems problems.
Our biggest problems are systems problems
Take poverty, for instance. In Poverty, by America, Matthew Desmond writes, “Poverty isn’t a line. It’s a tight knot of social maladies. It is connected to every social problem we care about — crime, health, education, housing — and its persistence in American life means that millions of families are denied safety and security and dignity in one of the richest nations in the history of the world.”
Research shows that a person’s zip code is a major determinant of economic, educational and health outcomes. This is a result of past policy choices (community displacement, disinvestment, redlining) as well as economic factors like local industry decline. Whatever the reason, when a community gets hollowed out, it takes job opportunities, schools, home equity — even access to grocery stores and hospitals — with it. When a self-reinforcing pattern takes hold, systems become entrenched, making it more difficult to course-correct over time.
The City as a System: Metabolic Design for New Urban Forms and Functions, which examines urban design through a living systems lens, echoes the difficulty of developing systemic solutions:
“The wickedness of urban problems is a direct result of the interconnectedness and mutual dependency of the various flows within the city. Each problem is therefore also a symptom of another problem. Any flow is always affected by and its course co-defined by all kinds of other flows. […] This complex intertwining means that a solution found for one place has an effect on all kinds of other places and themes that are at play in the city. The consequences of an intervention are therefore hardly foreseeable, if at all.”
So how do cities untangle these knotty problems?
A holistic approach for thriving communities
When I worked as an economic development strategist, we went beyond traditional economic assessments to better understand how a community functioned. We spent less time focusing on tax incentives and more time looking at factors like education, infrastructure, transportation, housing, healthcare, social equity, resilience, sustainability, culture and livability, civic engagement and economic diversification. What’s the cost of living here? Which industries are thriving? Is there a healthy mix of startups, small and medium enterprises and large employers? Are local businesses and educational institutions connected with the broader community? What are the downstream effects of local and state policy? Where are the centers of power? Is housing accessible and affordable? Is there equitable access to healthcare? What about parks and green space? Is there a sense of trust and belonging?
These questions aren’t just virtuous. A good education system and aligned workforce programs mean a better-educated, more productive workforce for local employers. Transit investments keep people and goods flowing. Access to affordable housing, healthcare and child care means retaining talent and increasing the number of available, healthy workers.
Of course, we don’t exist just to be productive workers. All of the factors I just mentioned (access to education, a living wage, housing, healthcare, green space, etc.) are basic dignities that should be extended to all human beings — with the positive side effect of creating dynamic, flourishing communities that also happen to boost economic output.
Meadows writes, “Living successfully in a world of complex systems means expanding not only time horizons and thought horizons; above all, it means expanding the horizons of caring. There are moral reasons for doing that, of course. And if moral arguments are not sufficient, then systems thinking provides the practical reasons to back up the moral ones.”
In Happy City, Charles Montgomery captures what this ethos means for urban dwellers:
“The city […] can enhance or corrode our ability to cope with everyday challenges. It can steal our autonomy or give us the freedom to thrive. It can offer a navigable environment, or it can create a series of impossible gauntlets that wear us down daily. The messages encoded in architecture and systems can foster a sense of mastery or helplessness. The good city should be measured not only by its distractions and amenities but also by how it affects this everyday drama of survival, work, and meaning.”
It takes a village
When working with communities, our team would dig into historical data and lead extensive community engagement to better understand the city’s underlying patterns. This helped us uncover not just what was happening, but why — which helps us select tactics and interventions that will be most effective based on the community’s identified priorities and goals. Engaging a broad diversity of perspectives and working closely with the community throughout the planning process provided a deeper level of context and nuance. It also fostered trust, built consensus around a unified vision and positioned the city for collective action and, ultimately, long-term success.
That said, naming problems can be easier that finding the right solution. Sometimes systems boundaries are drawn too narrowly or all the relevant factors aren’t taken into consideration. A common example is the way cities attempt to solve traffic problems by building more highways, thus attracting more cars and clogging up the highways even more than before.
One way to avoid myopic thinking is to expand your knowledge base outside of your core expertise. Meadows writes, “In spite of what you majored in, or what the textbooks say, or what you think you’re an expert at, follow a system wherever it leads. It will be sure to lead across traditional disciplinary lines.” (One of my favorite examples of interdisciplinary thinking is Drexel University’s Civic Engagement and Participatory Methods course, which teaches poetry to urban planning students in an effort to prepare them for the complexity of community work.)
Community leaders, economic developers and placemakers are very familiar with the importance of broadening perspectives and breaking down silos. In order to achieve big goals and tackle complex problems, the only way forward is through community-wide collective impact: a common agenda across agencies, common progress measures, collective ownership of mutually reinforcing activities that leverage each other’s knowledge and expertise, clear communication and, most importantly, trust. It takes a village, as they say.
The purpose of the system is what it does
Cybernetics theorist Stafford Beer coined the acronym POSIWID: the purpose of the system is what it does. That means a system’s true purpose is not what it is meant to do, but what it actually does. For instance, if a city’s public works system includes an environmental review process meant to protect the environment but actually delayed critical repairs to a sewage line that ended up bursting and dumping millions of gallons of raw human sewage into the Potomac River — well, that system’s purpose definitely wasn’t to maintain infrastructure and keep essential services running smoothly, let alone protect the environment.
Often times, this is caused by calcified rules or narrow metrics for success that warp the system to perform only to meet those limiting goals. This is why economic measures like gross domestic product (GDP) shouldn’t be the sole metric used to determine the health of a community or country. It “lumps together the goods and the bads,” as Meadows writes (e.g., things like car accidents and astronomically high medical bills make GDP go up). And it certainly doesn’t capture today’s vast wealth disparity that strains social services, productivity and overall political stability. But if economic growth alone doesn’t capture the true health of a community, what does?
Partha Dasgupta, an emeritus professor of economics at Cambridge, argues for the importance of putting a value on our natural ecosystem, seeing “its preservation as an economic imperative.” And in The London Consensus, a report that grew out of a 2023 conference of leading economists held at the London School of Economics (LSE), economist Lant Pritchett writes that “indicators of human development, such as those measured by the United Nations Development Programme (lower poverty, higher life expectancy, lower child mortality, enhanced literacy and numeracy, etc.) are closely correlated with economic growth.”
In fact, the UN recently released a more streamlined dashboard to measure progress than the ones tied to their Sustainable Development Goals, but whether it will be adopted is still being debated. Yes, tracking more than one metric takes a bit more effort, but it provides a more complete picture of how complex communities are actually performing.
Meadows writes, “No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, if we don’t speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.”
Progress is not a zero-sum game
To drive home the importance of holistic, systems-based thinking to spur both economic growth and community flourishing, let me introduce you to a few Nobel Prize winners and leading economists.
Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics for their theory of sustained growth through creative destruction. They advocate for collaboration and cooperation between governments, universities and businesses to spur innovation, a common refrain in the world of economic development. In The Power of Creative Destruction, Aghion also writes about the importance of investing in innovation while combatting inequality through education, retraining and other social support systems.
One of the best takes I’ve read on what this means for community leaders and placemakers comes from Ramon Marrades, Co-Director of Placemaking Europe:
“[Aghion] reminds us that innovation and inclusion are not opposites, that we do not have to choose between a dynamic economy and a protective welfare state. […] Inclusive systems generate the trust, education, and security that make innovation possible. The model of flexicurity (where losing your job does not mean losing your life) is precisely what makes creative destruction socially sustainable.”
He goes on to say:
“Progress is not a zero-sum game. A city can be innovative and inclusive, dynamic and fair, competitive and compassionate at the same time. What matters is not choosing a side, but designing the institutions, spaces, and cultures that make both possible.”
Aghion also makes an appearance in the aforementioned London Consensus, whose core principles (surprising for an economics report) include: “It’s not just the money: wellbeing is the key;” “growth matters, but so does place;” and “there is no good economics without good politics.” They make the case that a stable, equitable society is also good for economic growth.
As financial writer John Cassidy puts it, the London Consensus authors understand that “inequality cannot be ignored, not only because of the harmful effect it can have on individuals’ lives but also because of its broader consequences for economic development and political systems. Francisco H. G. Ferreira, a former World Bank economist who teaches at the L.S.E., reminds us that the notion that high levels of wealth inequality can lead to capture of the state by a self-interested élite harks back to Plato’s Republic. The fact that economists have belatedly rediscovered it is surely a welcome development.”
One of the main takeaways from these heady economic treatises is the importance of local, place-based interventions to support healthy economies and thriving communities. This might look like fostering a strong innovation ecosystem, building affordable housing, developing education and workforce training programs, supporting local businesses, repairing critical infrastructure, investing in communal public spaces, planning for climate resiliency or expanding cultural institutions. The key is to get to know your systems, identify priorities for intervention, co-create with your community and work collectively to bring about positive structural change.
Every intervention matters
It’s also important to point out that systems thinking on its own is not a silver bullet. Entrenched systems are notoriously good at adapting and finding ways to persist. Still, exploring the interconnections, feedback loops and other complex dynamics within a system gives us a more complete picture on which to make more informed decisions. It’s accepting that things are connected and complicated and messy — and if you draw the system boundary large enough, we are agents within the system, not actors controlling it from the outside. But it’s certainly a better alternative than staying put in our siloed, myopic ways of thinking and acting.
This is why collective community strategies should be flexible and adaptive to evolving conditions. (We called them “living, breathing playbooks” for a reason.) Once the path is set, community leaders are at the wheel, with agency to steer around unforeseen obstacles and changing circumstances, but ultimately going in the right direction toward their long-term vision. As Meadows writes, “We can’t control systems […] but we can dance with them!”
So far I’ve focused on macro-level systems. But I want to point out that individual and hyperlocal interventions matter, too. A common metaphor is that of fractals, a repeating pattern in nature where even the smallest parts resemble the whole, like the branches of a tree or the Fibonacci spiral of a shell. Like fractals, small acts of kindness have the potential to replicate and radiate outward. And even if they don’t, you still “eased one life in the aching.” This is also a form of prefigurative politics, “the idea that if you embodied in your actions and relationships the values you sought to establish more broadly, you succeeded at the immediate level, whether or not your campaign was successful,” as Rebecca Solnit writes.
Yes, there are large structural forces rigged in favor of certain interests that need to change; and there is also your city, your neighborhood, your neighbor, which you can support today. With all the uncertainly in the world, reorienting ourselves where we live helps us grasp care and connection more tangibly. We can work on the macro and micro simultaneously. Systems within systems.