growth
The role of history in structures
A lifelong project
Has it begun to sprout?
"That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?"Feedback analysis
The only way to discover your strengths is through feedback analysis. Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will happen. Nine or 12 months later, compare the actual results with your expectations.
Mechanisms and organisms
"Kant described a mechanism as a functional unity, in which the parts exist for one another in the performance of a particular function.
An organism, on the other hand, is a functional and structural unity in which the parts exist for and by means of one another in the expression of a particular nature.
This means that the parts of an organism – leaves, roots, flowers, limbs, eyes, heart, brain – are not made independently and then assembled, as in a machine, but arise as a result of interactions within the developing organism."
— Brian Goodwin, How the Leopard Changed His Spots
The Right Tools for the Job
Tool-building is an essential but poorly incentivized component of academic geography and social science more broadly. To conduct better science, we need to
build better tools.
A representational tension
Do I need to know the precise polygonal geometries of Los Angeles and the University of Southern California to assert that the latter is within the former? No. My mind contains no such precise geometric model of points and lines, yet I know that USC is in Los Angeles. When humans reason with the real world, they focus on its objects, relations, and processes—rather than starting with geometry—because these are the keys to understanding and explaining the real world. Our GIS tools, however, usually do the opposite. Built from the geometry-up around the legacy logic of traditional cartography (geometries and layers), most GIS tools today are restricted by that legacy’s limited ability to model objects, relations, and processes. A representational tension thus exists in GIScience between being a geometric information science versus an ontological, relational, and processual information science.
The teleology of tool-building
The teleology of tool-building suggests that the real value lies in the end use of the tool, rather than in its origins
Urban form and grain
One square mile of different cities' street networks, held at the same scale to compare the urban form and grain.
Software often feels inevitable
Software often feels inevitable because its backstory is often invisible. We click a download link, run an installer, and suddenly have a new tool to use. Yet this conceals years of human decisions, experiences, and constraints shaping software outcomes that are in no way pre-destined.