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p.1 This is the second of two volumes about the development of the U.S. urban system. It is a continuation of the concepts, representations, and explanations set forth in the first and thus can only be understood with volume I as background.
p.1 Changes in the scale and mix of activities associated with the management of performance do not alter either the logic of urban networks or their characteristic patterns... developmental activities... tend to transform the topology of the entire system. Developmental changes exert a much more direct and dramatic effect on network patterns.
p.2 It follows that to generalize about a sequence of change, one must be able to recognize recurrent developmental sequences over some significant historical period. Patterns formed by sequences of problems and developmental solutions are recognizable in the historical record. But these historical sequences are unique and nonrecurrent, as are all evolutionary processes. We may be able to generalize about the process, but not about the future patterns of its behavioral consequences... When we turn to the empirical representation of these network images, we look in vain for adequate activity data. Almost all publicly available data are classificational statistics. Therefore, throughout this study I have attempted to shape such data into forms that facilitate inferences about underlying activity networks... Employing these representational compromises, we inferred what we could about network patterns. [JLJ - I have examined the heuristics that aim to create "maybe" moves in complex games of strategy, this is a similar concept]
p.4 In moving from description to explanation, we recalled the fact that the growth-induced patterns of change are the indirect consequences of development - development being the source of the system slack that feeds growth. [JLJ - an interesting concept - an "advantage" in a complex game of strategy is partially explained as a source of slack that feeds further development - note to self, use this in future paper.]
p.40 Representations of industry-line transformations are generated... This is our resource for discerning the patterns of change in the change patterns that we know as the developmental code.
p.45 This sequence analysis reinforces and expands the evolutionary insight initiated in part one of volume I. The oscillating ebb and flow of change-pattern sequences suggests an evolutionary process in which a set of behavioral adaptations of one era separately and collectively leads to a new set of adaptive problems in the next. The pattern is consistent with an iterative series of both equilibrating (growth) and disequilibrating (developmental) adaptations to a changing operating environment. The mutual interactions of all establishments form the operating environment for each. Hence, the collective impact of the individual adaptations transforms the operating transactions network in ways that feed back on each behavioral entity. The systemic effects define a new problem-solving context requiring additional adaptations. There is, thus, a continuous progression of both favorable and unfavorable social-activity-wrought changes in localized transaction networks and geographical fields.
p.45 Behavioral change, possibly attended by the decline of some establishments, sectors, and localized subfields, is an essential part of problem-solving adaptations. The evolutionary insight sees system change as an historical process of system reorganization rather than an unfolding of a "genetic template."
p.101 Much has been made here of the historical process as an iterative, sequential, problem-solving progression by means of which human social systems make behavior-changing responses to challenge and how those developmental responses in turn often alter the situation in ways leading to new problems and new responses.
p.101 The underlying reason that the problem-solving process takes on an iterative, sequential form should now be emerging clearly. It is because the perceptions of problems and the development of adaptive solutions are commonly reductionist in nature – rarely are they system-wide in scope. Consequently, every problem-solving change alters the system relationships in ways not intended or expected and some of these results are subsequently perceived as new problems. Even when some problem-solving subsystem of an economy does achieve a satisfactory steady state, it is only a question of time before linked changes in the larger systems within which it is embedded (or in the small quasi-autonomous systems of which it is composed) shocks it out of its reverie.
p.107 The increasing complexity of these emerging processes exacerbated managerial and creative processes to a degree not previously experienced.
p.136 There you have it. [JLJ - one of my favorite phrases, because you can say it after anything that someone else says.]
p.146 Once again, however, we are confronted with difficulty in representing the shift patterns.
p.172 Physical processes are the handmaidens of the information processes that activate and coordinate them. They are incoherent in the absence of some form of cybernetic control.
p.175 Increasingly the compelling problems had to do with the management of complexity... the developmental process is an extension into the current period of the historical dynamic of the system.
p.175 The recorded patterns of change can now be visualized in the proper developmental context. As in every epoch, the developmental process is an extension into the current period of the historical dynamic of the system. The successes and failures of previous problem-solving efforts set a modified agenda of problems and opportunities for this latest epoch.
p.184 The shift pattern sequences observed seem consistent with only one interpretation: the regional and sectoral subfields of the urbanized transaction system are engaged in a dynamic process in which comparative advantages are sequentially gained and lost. An ebb and flow of fortunes takes place as the problem-solving adjustments of these subfields become, first, fully implemented and, then, subsequently subjected to the feedback effects of adjustments of other coadaptive regions and sectors – as different regions and sectors (differently situated in the total transaction field) experience different limits on their development potential, and as different sectors and regions are at one time in different phases of an adaptive scenario. We discover that no generalization about sequences or phases can be made to apply consistently to similar region-sectors at different times. The only conceptual system that seems appropriate for theorizing about this process is the evolutionary concept... this view of the process has a profound bearing on how we may productively view the future.
p.192 curious linkage changes can occur in unexpected ways
p.210 Consider the methodological implications of the need to represent transaction networks at the second level of behavior... This involves observing production and transportation activities and how they are linked to form integrated activity sequences we call processes. The resulting network pattern is given by their technological content. These patterns can be represented by abstract descriptions like engineering plans, or by empirical descriptions generated by observing activities at work. Either way, the units of observation and description are acts. The methodological tools required to describe and analyze their patterned connections are primarily relational. [JLJ - very useful. Note to self, put in next paper.]
p.210 the representational methodologies of social science are largely classificational-statistical, rather than relational. They lack the capacity to represent activity and process relationships directly and unambiguously. We have tinkered mightily with traditional tools so as to fashion empirical images supporting inferences about their underlying nature. We employ clever tricks that are useful and helpful, but plagued with hidden traps. Consider a sample of these devices and their limitations. The key device is a reliance on object or state data as surrogates for genuine activity data. To make the difference clear, we need to understand what is involved in observing and recording an act. The description of that act contains three elements – descriptors specifying an original state, descriptors indicating the nature of the transforming act, and descriptors specifying a terminal state.
p.211 The inherent limitations of using state variables as surrogates for activity data exposes us to another serious problem. Whatever the degree of representativeness that can be achieved by employing such data turns out to be highly perishable... In truth, underlying activity patterns can change radically without so much as rippling the surface of the state variable descriptor.
p.212 One has to be continuously alert to avoid cognitive illusion. Our profession has a pretty lethargic record.
p.212 One adaptive response can be seen in the development of commuting data. These are crude activity data that have been employed to make more sophisticated boundary delineations for the Bureau of the Census “metropolitan areas” and also in delineating the urban transaction fields.
p.214 Suffice it to say, we cannot expect to deal successfully with change if we place the behavior fields where change is spawned off-limits to observation... Where does the shift-share technique so extensively employed in this volume come in? It stands revealed as a limited analytical scheme... it makes a pseudodistinction between the growth elements (mix effects) and developmental elements (competitive effects) involved in change... It moves us into a discussion of developmental factors in an orderly fashion... it is only a transitional tool used to sweep complexity under the rug until we can obtain a preliminary grasp on the nature of change.
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