Organic Metaphors and Urban Causalities

Abstract

What if city development were equated with that of an organism? What if the organism served as a metaphor for urban investigation? It might be worthwhile and it is a course that I have taken in my own work, concerned with the 19th century development of Brussels and its planning tools, but it requires much tact and caution. For metaphors, as the mathematical biologist Evelyn Fox Keller argues, are not models, not analogies, not simulations, not comparisons. They are vague, unstable and literary sometimes. They do not point to similarities that concern the entire set of characteristics of the two given systems but pinpoint only one possible similarity that is underscored for the sole purpose of stimulating the investigator in her explorations. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether the metaphor is true or not - of course we all know that the city is not an organism - but to posit that it is so might help us to investigate one specific subject with a little more imagination. In other words, it opens up the possibility for sidetracking, i.e. deviating from the perspective of urban studies and sociology into the field of biology and life sciences. The subject in need of such imagination and sidetracking, is, in my case, causality. The hunch is an old one (…)