“The building of cities shifted from being a co-creation of the people who lived there to a technical undertaking by professionals. The method of change shifted from a painstaking craft to more of an assembly line. The mature city was assembled incrementally on a continuum of improvement; in contrast, the places we’ve built since about 1945 tend to be built all at once to a finished state.

A cornfield is complicated, but not complex: it requires a lot of technical expertise to maximize yields and account for such things as soil characteristics and weather conditions, but ultimately it’s a monoculture. A rainforest is complex, co-created by countless interactions among thousands of different species that couldn’t possibly be reduced to a formula.”