Seeing Cities as Systems

A new technology for navigating civic complexity

Last week The Civilization Lab (Civ Lab) released their SF Government Graph. The graph uses interactive network visualizations to map the relationships between every entity in San Francisco’s city government.¹

I think the project is a wonderfully practical demonstration of Mobus and Kalton’s third principle of systems science in action — any system can be represented as networks of relations among components.²

Introducing the SF Government Graph — The Civilization Lab

In this case, the system’s components are nodes which represent entities like the Mayor, or Board of Supervisors. The relationships are links between nodes representing relationships such as “The Mayor appoints members to the Citizens’ General Obligation Bond Oversight Committee. ”

Importantly, “every entity is linked to the legal source enabling it.”

SF Government Graph — Civ Lab

Civ Lab is run by my friend Michael Adams, an engineer who has turned his full focus towards “studying government and building tools to make it work better.”

I’m excited about this project because I’ve been a big fan of the Lab’s emphasis on teaching citizens how to learn about the mechanics of their local government.

In this age of national polarization, geopolitical chaos, and historically low institutional trust, I have very little faith in our capacity to effectively address most systemic political problems in top-down fashion. It isn’t practical to place all of our focus on national policies and who sits in the Oval Office.

I don’t want to dismiss the importance of national politics and the real impact of federal policies on our daily lives and I do have strong feelings and opinions about these matters. I just don’t believe this is the arena in which the average person can most usefully direct their attention and discover political agency.

I think there are more effective strategies for affecting systemic political change. These include doing better local politics,³ reviving civic associations,⁴ and running small-scale radical experiments with completely new forms of governance.⁵

But we must understand systems before we can improve them.

Technologies like the gov graph could be powerful tools for empowering citizens. They can help people see cities as the complex adaptive systems they are and enable them to effectively navigate that complexity.

I can imagine how constructing a graph for every city could contribute to the emergence of a new generation of systems-oriented citizens in the United States. Citizens who emphasize pragmatic local political problem solving over ideological bickering in the tragic theater which is modern American national politics.

1. Adams, M. (2023, July 16). Introducing the SF Government Graph. https://www.writing.civlab.org/p/introducing-the-sf-government-graph

2. Thornton, S. (2023, May 16). Networks [Substack newsletter]. System Explorers. https://systemexplorers.substack.com/p/networks

3. Adams, M. (2023, July 16). How SF Government Works. https://www.writing.civlab.org/p/how-sf-government-works-civics-class

4. Willems, A., Morin, J., & Lewis, A. (n.d.). There’s a Neighbor for That: On Civic Associations as a Social Technology. Other Internet. Retrieved September 4, 2024, from https://otherinter.net/research/local-gov/local-gov

5. Rong, H., & Mao, Z. (2023, June 14). Deep-Dive Into CityDAO: An Experiment in Collective Land Ownership and Decentralized Governance. Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/deep-dive-citydao-experiment-collective-land-ownership-and-decentralized-governance