Perfect observations on urbanism and the organic, fractal, life of human communities by @nntaleb. Thread with quotes and observations from his book Antifragile. Required reading for politicians, town planners, architects, interior designers, traffic engineers, teachers etc. 
@nntaleb “Urban planning demonstrates the central property of the so-called top-down effect: top-down is usually irreversible, so mistakes tend to stick...” (Taleb) this ties in perfectly with the ideas of Schumacher, Kohr, Illich, etc. on the human scale.
@nntaleb “White walls with sharp corners and Euclidian angles and crisp shapes strain me. And once they are built, there is no way to get rid of them. Almost everything built since World War II has an unnatural smoothness to it.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb
@nntaleb This rhymes perfectly with some of my favorite memes here, on order (organic, anti-fragile, fractal, scaled) versus chaos (inorganic, uniform, jagged, fragile).
@nntaleb And of course, my favorite meme of all time (not one of mine alas).
@nntaleb “Recall the discussion of municipal properties—they don’t translate into something larger because problems become more abstract as they scale up, and the abstract is not something human nature can manage properly.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb
@nntaleb So far so good, on the theory, here Taleb mention real life examples of fractal cities: London vs. Brazilia, and Medieval Paris vs. Haussmann's Paris, quoting @stewartbrand whose book How Buildings Learn is absolutely essential reading.
@nntaleb @stewartbrand Continuing on the theme of neomania and the fragile, smooth, rational, progressive theories we find in architecture and traffic planning, Taleb draws parallels with the metric system and thence to all systems, even language. What unites these are their contept of the human scale.
