City and interaction: the role of space in social organization

Abstract How can seemingly chaotic personal acts create the coherent systems of interaction that surround us? In this paper, we attempt to answer this key question by suggesting the role for cities on how we coordinate seemingly chaotic decisions. We look into these elementary processes exploring a particular concept: “social entropy”, or how social systems deal with uncertainty and unpredictability in the transition from individual actions to systems of interaction. We examine the following conditions: (i) actions rely on informational differences latent in their environments, (ii) the city itself is an information environment to actions, and we propose that (iii) space becomes a form of creating differences in the probabilities of interaction. We investigate this process through simulations of distinct material scenarios to find that space is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the reduction of entropy. Finally, we suggest that states and fluctuations of entropy are a vital part of social reproduction, and reveal a deep connection between social, informational and spatial systems.

摘要 看似无序的个体行为，如何构筑出我们周遭井然有序的互动系统？本文旨在解答这一核心问题，探讨城市在我们协调看似无序的决策过程中所扮演的角色。我们围绕此类基础过程展开研究，聚焦一项核心概念：社会熵（social entropy），即社会系统在从个体行为向互动系统转型的过程中，如何应对不确定性与不可预测性。我们验证了如下三项前提：其一，行为依赖于其所处环境中潜藏的信息差异；其二，城市本身便是作用于行为的信息环境；其三，空间可作为调节互动概率差异的载体。我们通过多种具体物质场景的模拟对该过程进行探究，结果发现，空间是降低熵值的必要非充分条件。最后，本文提出，熵的状态与波动是社会再生产的重要组成部分，并揭示了社会系统、信息系统与空间系统之间的深层关联。