ABSTRACT

The city is a complex adaptive system with strong analogies to biologically-based ecosystems. These analogies—species/types, species/human communities, boundaries/ecotones, functional places/ecological patches, and so forth—provide one way of understanding the functional complexity of the city and the relationships among its parts.

Production has a particular role in the urban ecosystem. In the craft or manufacturing process, value is added to materials, resulting in a more complex level of organization. This is analogous to energy and material inputs in an ecological system, resulting in greater species diversity and greater ecological complexity. In manufacturing, raw materials are turned into subparts, and subparts are assembled into the finished product; each step requires inputs of energy, skill, design, engineering, and materials that have themselves been transformed to a particular state of physical organization. These inputs are themselves the results of similar inputs at different scales, and result in products that are more complex in their organization.

The development of physical structures such as factories, assembly lines, and transportation systems, as well as non-physical systems such as manufacturing protocols, corporate organizational structures, and technical know-how, themselves add value not only to the product, but to the city itself. Production and manufacturing make the product, but also make the city—helping to give it its complexity and high level of organization.