The Metropolis Organism

On Dec 10, 2012, at 1:49 PM, Kent Barshov wrote:

Hi Frank

Nice to receive an email from you.

The idea of co-existing but non-overlapping though systems is something I've been thinking a lot about, after reading a couple books over the past year: "Of Two Minds" by the American psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Schiffer and "The Master and His Emissary" by the British psychiatrist Dr. Iain McGilchrist. Both of them have informative websites.

Here's the link for a 12-minute video presentation on YouTube about the "Divided Brain"  which summarizes the work of Dr. McGilchrist:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFs9WO2B8uI

Here are some more thoughts regarding the organic-like nature of cities.  It seems that real life, as commonly accepted and interpreted by culture and science, is a prerequisite for life-like or organic-like cities---meaning whether it's an ant colony or a human city, it takes life forms to first be present prior to the colony or city organizing itself and functioning in life-like ways. E.g. there's nothing on the moon or on the planet Mars which resembles a city organism, since there's no known life on either the moon or Mars.

As we had communicated rather a long while ago now, I think rather than trying to get people to accept that a city organism is actually alive, it's more fruitful to set aside whether it's alive or not, and to think about how the organic-like structure of cities can make us appreciate cities more, and to generate ways to improve city life.

Happy holidays,

Kent