Symposia
A symposium brings together a small group of participants for a series of socratic dialogues.
Socratic dialogues are guided conversations where participants explore ideas, develop habits of critical thinking and practice effective habits of communication.
✱ The architecture of cooperation
The story of human prosperity is the story of cooperation. This symposium reveals how we learned to trust strangers, punish cheaters, and build institutions that make complex economic life possible.
Cooperation is so ubiquitous that, like fish in water, we take it for granted. You're currently using a device that thousands of strangers made for you. If you visit a restaurant for dinner tonight, they will serve you your dinner without requiring a security deposit. It is easy to take this degree of trust and cooperation for granted.
There's also a tendency to attribute all that is orderly to laws and legislations that must have made it so, and similarly attribute all that is *dis*orderly to their absence or weak enforcement. But the machinery that enables the deep cooperation that is the defining characteristic of modern life has multiple gears; it is a mistake to attribute ubiquitous honesty to the single lever of state power.
Cooperation is sustained at multiple levels. Humans are compulsive norm-enforcers, which creates expectations, provides guidance for appropriate behavior, and supports cooperation in regularized exchanges. In small groups, informal norms and personal trust underpin cooperation, as shown in classic studies of the 11th century Maghribi traders or the Jewish diamond dealers in New York. But norms fail to secure cooperation outside small groups; in those situations, we need the state to enforce contracts between strangers and create trust. States that perform this role well enable complex forms of cooperation through specialization and the division of labour. Such societies become prosperous.
Across five seminars, we will explore the architecture of cooperation—the hierarchy of instincts, norms and formal institutions that support cooperation in our modern world.
The architecture of cooperation
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✱ The functional order of cities
The state's need for legibility clashes with the organic complexity that makes cities work. Discover why centralized attempts to impose legible order often produce fragile, dysfunctional systems despite their rational appearance.
Cities shape our daily lives in profound ways, yet the principles that make them vibrant or lifeless, safe or dangerous, remain poorly understood. This program brings together two of the most insightful critics of urban planning and state simplification—Jane Jacobs and James C. Scott—to explore fundamental questions about how cities work and how they are shaped by attempts to make them legible from above.
Jane Jacobs, writing against the dominant urban planning orthodoxy of her time, showed that vibrant cities emerge from the complex interactions of ordinary people going about their daily lives. The seeming chaos of sidewalk life, the fine-grained mixing of uses, the "eyes on the street" – these organic patterns make cities safer and more livable than the rational plans of modernist designers. Yet these vital patterns are precisely what large-scale planning tends to destroy in its quest for order and efficiency.
James C. Scott helps us understand why. His analysis of "authoritarian high modernism" reveals how states and planners, in their drive to make society legible and manageable from the center, impose simplified grids that ignore local knowledge and complex social relations. Just as scientific forestry reduced diverse woodlands to standardized timber farms, modernist urban planning sought to rationalize the "chaos" of existing cities into segregated zones and geometric layouts visible from above.
Through careful reading of key texts by both authors, we'll explore the tension between organic urban vitality and administrative legibility, between local knowledge and central control, between complexity and simplification. The parallels between scientific forestry and urban zoning, between standardized weights and measures and standardized city blocks, illuminate deeper patterns in how states try to make society readable – and how this reshapes the lived experience of citizens.
Across four seminars, we'll explore what makes cities work, why certain forms of planning fail, and how we might better balance the needs for both spontaneous vitality and planning in our cities.
The functional order of cities
This program is currently on pause. Register your interest to be notified when it resumes.
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