The Well-Tempered City: What Modern Science, Ancient Civilizations, and Human Nature Teach Us About the Future of Urban Life

The fourth quality of a well-tempered city is community—social networks made of well-tempered people.

From the beginning the balance between civilization and nature has been essential to meeting both our spiritual and practical needs.

Cognitive science has now shown that the experience of awe is deeply associated with increased compassion, and the practice of ritual with social affiliation.

These two cultural practices, the belief in “big gods” and advances in agriculture, evolved hand in hand, and are evident in the foundation of very early cities in history.

During the Ubaid period, as communities joined the network the generative value of the whole system grew geometrically, a phenomenon described by Metcalf’s law (which was developed to describe the growth of modern communication networks): the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system.

The Biocomplexity Institute at Indiana University defines biocomplexity as “the study of the emergence of self-organized, complex behaviors from the interaction of many simple agents.

The fifth quality of the well-tempered city, compassion, is essential for a city to have a healthy balance between individual and collective well-being.

The success of Lübeck demonstrates important tools for creating thriving cities that apply to this day. Even in the Digital Age, businesspeople like to get together and gossip, trade, compete, and collaborate.

Electing a ditch boss, as the role came to be known, is the oldest and longest-running democratic process in the world, and continues to this day in many parts of the world.

“This is the earliest complex society in the world. If you want to understand the roots of the urban revolution, you have to look at the Ubaid.”