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Global complexity and the carsystem
JOHN URRY
Dept of Sociology, Lancaster
University, Lancaster, LA14YL,
UK
j.urry@lancaster.ac.uk
This paper seeks to show that theories
complex systems are relevant to deciphering
the nature of global relationships. Such
analyses are especially relevant to hybrids of
social-and physical relations that seem
especially significant in the contemporary
world. The paper begins with an introductory
account of complexity theory as applied to
social phenomena. The bulk of the paper then
considers one particular hybrid utterly central
to ‘globalisation’, the car system and how it is
to be theorised via complexity notions.
Notions of path dependency are deployed in
examining this global car system as a leading
example of ‘global complexity’. Automobility
taken to be an ‘island of order’ as analysed by
Prigogine. Complexity is also I try to show
the starting point for examining how this
global system that seems so unchangeable, so
stable, may through small changes, if they
occur in a certain order, tip it into a post car
mobility system (via the analysis of tipping
points). I thus consider some ways of
theorising how exactly the car system will in
the course of the twenty first century becomes
extinct.
COMPLEXITY
CAR-SYSTEM
GLOBALISATION
PATH DEPENDENCY
TIPPING POINT
‘Time is not absolutely defined’. Albert
Einstein
‘We are observing the birth of a science
that is no longer limited to idealized and
simplified situations but reflects the
complexity of the real world, a science
that views us and our creativity as part of
the fundamental trend present at all levels
of nature’. Ilya Prigogine
‘Elements are elements only for the
system that employs them as units and
they are such only through this system’.
Niklas Luhmann
‘…city life is subtly but profoundly
changed, sacrificed to that abstract space
where cars circulate like so many atomic
particles…. [T]he driver is concerned only
with steering himself to his [sic]
destination, and in looking about sees only
what he needs to see for that purpose; he
thus perceives only his route, which has
been materialized, mechanized, and
technicized, and he sees it from one angle
only – that of its functionality: speed,
readability, facility’. Henri Lefebvre
1. The growth of the global
The 1990s has seen the growth of the internet
with a take-up faster than any previous
technology, with 1 billion users soon
worldwide. The dealings of foreign exchange
that occur each day are worth $1.4 trillion,
sixty times greater than the amount of world
trade. Communications ‘on the move’ are
being transformed with new mobile phones
now more common in the world than
conventional land-line phones. There are
700m international journeys made each year,
a figure soon to pass 1 billion. 3 billion people
across the world receiving the same total
income as the richest 300. Globally branded
companies have budgets greater than
individual countries. Images of the blue earth
from space or the golden arches of
McDonalds are ubiquitous across the world
upon the billion TV sets. New technologies
are producing ‘global times’ with distances
between places and peoples dramatically
reducing, even ‘de-materialising’.
Various commentators have tried to
understand these global changes. Giddens has
described modern social life as being like a
driverless out-of-control ‘juggernaut’ (1990),
Bauman describes speeded-up ‘liquid
modernity’ (2000), Castells elaborates the
growth of an ‘internet galaxy’ (2001), Hardt
and Negri suggest that nation-state
sovereignty have been replaced by a single
system of power, of ‘empire’ (2000), Rifkin
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analyses the implications of the ‘new physics’
for the study of capitalist property relations
(2000: 191-3), while over one hundred authors
a year elaborate the ‘globalisation’ of
economic, social and political life (see for
example, Held, McGrew, Goldblatt, Perraton
1999). These debates transform existing
controversies, such as the relative significance
of social structure and human agency.
Moreover, there is no single and agreed-upon
globalisation-thesis; there are five main
theories based respectively upon the concepts
of structure, flow, ideology, performance, and
complexity (see Urry 2003: chap 1).
It is the last of these, the notion of global
complexity that concerns me here (see Urry
2003). And in coupling together the ‘global’
and ‘complexity’ I am not claiming that
complexity solves all the problems of the
social sciences. Nor is globalisation only and
exhaustively comprehensible through
complexity. And most of all I am not
suggesting that the ‘social’ implications of
complexity are clear cut. But since the
systemic features of globalisation are not yet
appropriately theorised (see Rosenberg’s
critique, 2000), it is worth examining whether
the complexity sciences may provides
concepts and methods that illuminate
globalisation as a series of self-organising
systems (see related efforts in Capra 2002,
Urry 2003).
I thus take up the recommendations of the
US-based Gulbenkian Commission on the
Restructuring of the Social Sciences, chaired by
Wallerstein and including non-linear scientist
Prigogine (Wallerstein 1996). The
Commission advocates breaking down the
division between ‘natural’ and ‘social’ science
through seeing both characterised by
‘complexity’ (Wallerstein 1996; more
generally on the growth of complexity
thinking, see Thrift 1999).
This involves not ‘conceiving of humanity as
mechanical, but rather instead conceiving of
nature as active and creative’, to make ‘the
laws of nature compatible with the idea of
events, of novelty, and of creativity’. The
Commission recommends how scientific
analysis ‘based on the dynamics of nonequilibria, with its emphasis on multiple
futures, bifurcation and choice, historical
dependence, and …intrinsic and inherent
uncertainty’ should be the model for the
social sciences and this would undermine
clear-cut divisions between humans and
nature, and between social and natural
science (Wallerstein 1996: 61, 63).
However, this Commission is silent on the
study of globalisation although the global
level is surely par excellence characterised by
complex processes that are simultaneously
social and natural (Urry 2003). Indeed most
significant phenomena that the so-called
social sciences now deal with are hybrids of
physical and social relations, with no purified
sets of the physical or the social. Such hybrids
include health, technologies, the
environment, the internet, automobility,
extreme weather and so on. These hybrids
central in any analysis of global relations are
best examined through complexity-analyses
of the interdependent ‘inhuman’ or material
worlds (see also Capra 2002).
2. Complexity
Complexity examines how components of a
system through their dynamic interaction
‘spontaneously’ develop collective properties
or patterns that are not implicit within, or at
least not implicit in the same way, within
individual components (see Urry 2003:chap 2
for a fuller account). Complexity investigates
emergent properties, certain regularities of
behaviour that somehow transcend the
ingredients that make them up. Complexity
argues against reducing the whole to the
parts. And in so doing it transforms scientific
understanding of far-from-equilibrium
structures, of irreversible times and of nonEuclidean mobile spaces. It emphasises the
nature of strong interactions occurring
between the parts of systems, with often the
absence of a central hierarchical structure
that ‘governs’ and produces outcomes. These
outcomes are both uncertain and irreversible.
The use of complexity should enable us to
break with dualistic thinking, which holds
that there either are ‘systems’ or there are
‘system failures’ (Malpas and Wickham 1995).
Chaos and order are to be seen as always
interconnected within systems operating in
and through time-space.
Time and space are not to be understood as
the container of bodies that move along these
dimensions (Capra 1996; Casti 1994;
Prigogine 1997). Time and space are internal
to the processes by which the physical and
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social worlds themselves operate, helping to
constitute their very powers. Such a view
leads to the thesis that there is not a single
time but multiple times and that such times
appear to flow. Hawking summarises how:
‘Space and time are now dynamic qualities:
when a body moves, or a force acts, it affects
the curvature of space and time - and in turn
the structure of space-time affects the way in
which bodies move and forces act’ (1988: 33;
Adam 1998).
More generally, thermodynamics shows that
there is an irreversible flow of time. Rather
than there being time-symmetry and a
reversibility of time as postulated in classical
physics, there is a clear distinction between
the past and future. An arrow of time results
within open systems in the loss of
organisation and an increase in randomness
or disorder over time (Coveney 2000). But
there is not a simple growth of disorder.
Prigogine shows how new order arises but it
is far from equilibrium. There are what he
terms dissipative structures, islands of new
order within a sea of disorder, maintaining or
even increasing their order at the expense of
greater overall entropy. He describes how
such localised order ‘floats in disorder’ (cited
Capra 1996: 184). It is non-equilibrium
situations that are sources of new order.
Turbulent flows of water and air, which
appear chaotic, are highly organised. Matter
continuously flows into the vortex funnel of a
whirlpool in a bath. The system is
organisationally closed and maintains a stable
form although it is far from equilibrium.
Moreover, the very phenomena of time and
space are historical. The big bang apparently
created in that very moment both space and
time. There was no pre-existing space and
time: ‘any attempt to explain the origin of the
physical universe must perforce involve an
explanation of how space and time came into
existence too’ (Davies 2001: 57). There is
therefore no ‘time’ before the big bang, and
if/when the universe ends in another singular
event time (and space) will also cease. Space
and time appear to have been spontaneously
created, part of the systemic nature of the
universe. They are suddenly switched on,
through an unpredictable and yet apparently
irreversible quantum change (Hawking 1988;
Coveney and Highfield 1990; Casti 1994).
Times are both multiple and unpredictable.
Prigogine talks of the ‘end of certainty’ as the
complexity sciences overcome what he calls
the ‘two alienating images of a deterministic
world and an arbitrary world of pure chance’
(1997: 189). Complexity thus repudiates the
dichotomies of determinism and chance, as
well as nature and society, being and
becoming, stasis and change. Physical
systems do not exhibit and sustain
unchanging structural stability. The
complexity sciences elaborate how there is
order and disorder within all physical and
social phenomena including, according to
Kauffman, within the nature of evolution itself
(1993).
Systems are thus seen by complexity as being
‘on the edge of chaos’. Order and chaos are in
a kind of balance where the components are
neither fully locked into place but yet do not
dissolve into anarchy. Chaos is not complete
anarchic randomness but there is a ‘orderly
disorder’ present within all such dynamic
systems (see Hayles 1991, 1999).
A further consequence of this flowingness of
time is that minor changes in the past produce
potentially huge effects in the present. Such
small events are not ‘forgotten’. Chaos theory
in particular rejects the common-sense notion
that only large changes in causes produce
large changes in effects (Gleick 1988).
Following a deterministic set of rules,
unpredictable yet patterned results can be
generated, with small causes on occasions
producing large effects and vice versa. The
classic example is the butterfly effect
accidentally discovered by Lorenz in 1961.
Minuscule changes at one location can
theoretically produce, if modelled by three
coupled non-linear equations, very large
weather effects to occur very far in time
and/or space from the original site of the
hypothetical wings flapping (Casti 1994: 96;
Maasen and Weingart 2000: 93-4. There is no
consistent relationship between cause and
effect. Rather relationships between variables
can be non-linear with abrupt switches
occurring, so the same ‘cause’ can in specific
circumstances produce quite different kinds of
effect. Capra describes how ‘Nonlinear
phenomena dominate much more of the
inanimate world than we had thought, and
they are an essential aspect of the network
pattern of living systems’ (1996: 122; White
1995).
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Chaos theory is based upon iteration of a
relatively simple mathematical algorithm.
Complexity by contrast investigates systems
capable of adapting and evolving, which are
organising over time (see Mitleton-Kelly
2003). The character of such complex social
interactions have been likened to walking
through a maze whose walls rearrange
themselves as each new step is taken (Gleick
1988: 24). And as one walks new sets of steps
have to be made in order to adjust to the
changing location of the surrounding walls of
the maze. Complexity thus investigates the
emergent, dynamic and self-organising
systemic properties (Prigogine 1997: 35).
Such systems are unstable. A particular agent
rarely produces a single and confined effect.
Interventions or changes will tend to produce
an array of possible effects right across the
system in question. Prigogine describes these
system effects as ‘a world of irregular, chaotic
motions’ (1997: 155). Cohen and Stewart
describe those ‘regularities of behaviour that
somehow seem to transcend their own
ingredients’ (1994: 232; Byrne 1998: chap 3;
Jervis 1997, on ‘system effects’). It is not that
the sum is greater than the size of its parts –
but that there are system effects that are
somehow different from its parts. Complexity
examines how components of a system
through their interaction ‘spontaneously’
develop collective properties or patterns.
Moreover, if a system passes a particular
threshold with minor changes in the
controlling variables, switches may occur and
the emergent properties turn over. Thus a
liquid turns or tips into a gas, relatively warm
weather suddenly transforms into an ice age
(Byrne 1998: 23; Cohen and Stewart 1994:
21). Nicolis summarises how in a non-linear
system: ‘adding two elementary actions to one
another can induce dramatic new effects
reflecting the onset of cooperativity between
the constituent elements. This can give rise to
unexpected structures and events whose
properties can be quite different from those of
the underlying elementary laws’ (1995: 1-2).
In particular, the emergence of patterning
within any given system stems from coevolution and mutual adaptation. An
emergent complex system is the result of a
rich interaction of simple elements that ‘only
respond to the limited information each is
presented with’ (Cilliers 1998: 5). Agents act
in terms of the local environment but each
agent adapts, or co-evolves, to local
circumstances ‘within an environment in
which other similar agents are also adapting,
so that changes in one agent may have
consequences for the environment and thus
the success of other agents’ (Gilbert 1995:
148). Each co-evolves, demonstrating a
‘capability to “orientate” to macro-level
properties’ so paradoxically bringing into
being certain emergent properties (Gilbert
1995: 151).
In particular dynamic systems do not move
through all possible parts of a potential or
phase space but instead occupies a restricted
part of it. This stems from the mathematics of
attractors (Capra 1996: chap 6). The simplest
attractor is a point, as with the unforced
swinging of a pendulum with friction. The
simple system reaches the single point
attractor. Metaphorically it can be said that
‘the fixed point at the centre of the coordinate
system “attracts” the trajectory’ (Capra 1996:
130).
A more complex example is a domestic
central heating/air conditioning system
where the attractor consists of a specified
range of temperatures. The relationship is not
linear but involves negative feedback
mechanisms or processes to minimise
deviance and re-establish the range of
temperatures. It is impossible to predict
exactly what the precise temperature will be –
only that it will lie within the range that
constitutes the attractor. Topologically this
attractor is like a doughnut, a system close to
equilibrium in which effective negative
feedback loops always bring the temperatures
back within the range specified within the
system. This is a self-regulating and bounded
system where negative feedback is crucial.
Byrne suggests that this is analogous to
Fordism that functioned for much of the
twentieth century as an attractor for leading
industrial societies (see Byrne 1998: 28).
In certain complex systems there are ‘strange
attractors’. These are unstable spaces to
which the trajectory of dynamical systems is
attracted through billions of iterations as
agents are co-evolving in complex ways over
time. What are important here are positive
feedbacks that take the system away from
equilibrium (Byrne 1998: 26-9). This dynamic
instability can be seen in the butterfly shaped
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Lorenz attractor (see Capra 1996: 133). Such
attractors are immensely sensitive in the
effects generated to slight variations in their
initial conditions. Thus: ‘very small
differences in the value of control parameters
at the bifurcation point determine which of
two radically different trajectories the system
settles into’ (Byrne 1998: 28). And as iteration
occurs time and time again, so an unstable
and unpredictable pattern develops. It is
impossible to predict which point in such
space the trajectory of an attractor will pass
through even though there are deterministic
laws involved. Much recent science has been
concerned to characterise the shaping or
topology of such strange attractors. (Capra
1996: 132).
Central to the patterning of attractors in time
and space are the different feedback
mechanisms. Early cybernetic research under
the auspices of the Macy Conferences in the
post-World War II period emphasised the
importance of negative feedback loops. These
have the effect of restoring the homeostatic
functioning of whatever system was under
examination. However, in later systems
formulations, of complexity or the non-linear,
positive feedback loops are much more
examined. These are viewed as exacerbating
initial stresses in the system, so rendering it
unable to absorb shocks and re-establishing
the original equilibrium (Hayles 1999).
Positive feedback occurs when a change
tendency is reinforced rather than dampened
down. Positive feedback can be seen in the
economic and sociological analyses of
increasing returns that occur across a whole
industry or activity (Arthur 1994; Waldrop
1994; and see section 3 below).
Maturana and Varela developed the notion
that systems are autopoietic (Maturana 1981;
Mingers 1995). Autopoiesis involves the idea
that living systems entail a process of selfmaking or self-producing. There is a network
of production processes in which the function
of each component is to participate in the
production or transformation of other
components in the network. In this way the
network comes to make itself. It is produced
by the components and this in turn produces
the components. In a living system the
product of its operation is its own
organisation, with the development of
boundaries specifying the domain of its
operations and defining the self-making
system (Capra 1996: 98; Hayles 1999: chap 6).
Autopoiesis can also be seen in the nature of
urban growth. Small local preferences mildly
expressed in the concerns of individuals, such
as wanting to live with those who are
ethnically similar, produces very strongly
segregated self-organising neighbourhoods
such as those characteristic of large American
cities. Krugman argues that residential
patterns are unstable in the face of random
perturbations: ‘local, short-range interactions
can create large-scale [self-organizing]
structure’ (1996: 17).
In the next section I relate these varied
notions to one particular global system, that
of automobility (other global systems are
examined in Urry 2003).
3. Complexity and the Car
One billion cars were manufactured during
the last century. There are over 700m cars
roaming the world. World car travel is
predicted to triple between 1990 and 2050
(Hawkin, Lovins, Lovins 1999). Country after
country is developing an ‘automobile culture’
with the most significant at present being
China. By 2030 there may be 1 billion cars
worldwide (Motavalli 2000: 20-1, 231-2).
Strangely the car is rarely discussed in the
‘globalisation literature’ although its
domination is more systemic than the cinema,
television and the computer normally viewed
as global technologies. I show below that
automobility is a profoundly significant and
interesting example of ‘global complexity’
(see Sheller and Urry 2000, for much below).
‘Automobility’ is a hybrid assemblage, of
humans (drivers, passengers, pedestrians) as
well as machines, roads, buildings, signs and
entire cultures of mobility with which it is
intertwined (Thrift 1996: 282-84). What is
key is not the ‘car’ as such but the system of
these fluid interconnections since: ‘a car is not
a car because of its physicality but because
systems of provision and categories of things
are “materialized” in a stable form’ that then
we might say possesses very distinct
affordances (Slater 2001: 6). It is necessary to
consider what stable form or ‘system’
automobility constitutes as it makes and
remakes itself across the globe.
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Automobility should be viewed through the
language of complexity, as a self-organising,
non-linear system (autopoeitic automobility!).
It spreads world-wide, cars, car-drivers,
roads, petroleum supplies and a huge array of
novel objects, technologies and signs that cars
both presuppose and call into existence. The
system generates the preconditions for its
own self-expansion. Luhmann defines
autopoeisis as: ‘everything that is used as a
unit by the system is produced as a unit by
the system itself. This applies to elements,
processes, boundaries, and other structures
and, last but not least, to the unity of the
system itself’ (1990: 3; see Mingers 1995).
Automobility has, especially through calling
into being new times and spaces, produced
what is ‘used by a unit as a unit’.
This system of automobility stems from the
path-dependent pattern laid down in the
1890s. Once economies and societies were
‘locked in’ to the ‘steel-and-petroleum’ car,
massive increasing returns resulted for those
producing and selling those cars and its
associated infrastructure, products and
services (see Arthur 1994). And at the same
time social life irreversibly locked in to the
mode of mobility that automobility both
generates and presupposes. This mode of
mobility is neither socially necessary nor
inevitable but seems impossible to break from.
From relatively small causes an irreversible
pattern was laid down and this has ensured
the preconditions for automobility’s selfexpansion over the past ‘century of the car’.
Such increasing returns are connected with
how patterns of socio-technical development
are ‘path-dependent’ (see Kelly 1998). The
notions of path dependence emphasises the
importance over time of the ordering of
events or processes. Contra linear models the
temporal patterning in which events or
processes occur influences the way that they
eventually turn out (Mahoney 2000: 536).
Causation can indeed flow from contingent
minor events to hugely powerful general
processes that through increasing returns get
locked in over lengthy periods of time.
‘History matters’ in the processes of pathdependent developments (North 1990: 100).
This path-dependence is typically established
for small-scale, local reasons. Thus most
famously the QWERTY keyboard of the
typewriter was introduced in 1873 in order to
slow down typists. However, having
established the keyboard layout for such
small-scale reasons in the late 19th century,
this layout remained even with the huge
technological changes in what a ‘keyboard’ is
in the late twentieth century (see Arthur
1994; North 1990).
And in the 1890s there were three main
methods of propelling vehicles: petrol, steam
and electric batteries, with the latter two
being more ‘efficient’ (Motavalli 2000: chap1;
Scharff 1991). Petroleum fuelled cars were
established for small-scale, more or less
accidental reasons, partly because a petrol
fuelled vehicle was one of only 2 to complete a
‘horseless carriage competition’ in Chicago in
1896. The petrol system got established and
‘locked’ in, and the rest is history so to speak.
Thus small causes occurring in a certain order
at the end of the nineteenth century turned
out to have awesome and irreversible
consequences for the twentieth century. The
‘path-dependence’ of the petroleum-based car
got locked in although it was not
technologically preferable. But having got
locked in the rest is history, as an astonishing
array of other industries, activities and
interests came to mobilise around the
petroleum-based car. As North writes more
generally: ‘Once a development path is set on
a particular course, the network externalities,
the learning process of organizations, and the
historically derived subjective modelling of
the issues reinforce the course’ (1990: 99).
What is key is that: ‘small chance events
become magnified by positive feedback’ and
this ‘locks in’ such systems so that increasing
returns or positive feedback result over time
(Brian Arthur, quoted in Waldrop 1994: 49).
Relatively deterministic patterns of inertia
reinforce established patterns through
processes of positive feedback. This escalates
change through a ‘lock-in’ that over time
takes the system away from what we might
imagine to be the point of ‘equilibrium’ and
from what could have been optimal in
‘efficiency’ terms, such as a non-QWERTY
keyboard or electric forms of powering cars
(Motavalli 2000).
The importance of the lock-in means that
institutions matter a great deal to how
systems develop. Such institutions can
produce a long term irreversibility that is
‘both more predictable and more difficult to
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reverse’ (North 1990: 104). The effects of the
petroleum car over a century after its chance
establishment show how difficult it is to
reverse locked-in institutional processes as
billions of agents co-evolve and adapt to that
remaking itself across the globe (see Sheller
and Urry 2000).
In particular automobility has irreversibly set
in train new socialities, of family life,
community, leisure, the pleasures of
movement and so on. The growth in
automobility produces new movement and is
not the replacement of public transport by the
car (see Vigar 2002: 12; Adams 1999). These
mobilities result from how the car system is
immensely flexible and wholly coercive.
Automobility is a source of freedom, the
‘freedom of the road’. Its flexibility enables
the car-driver to travel at speed, at any time
in any direction along the complex road
systems of western societies that link together
most houses, workplaces and leisure sites.
Cars therefore extend where people can go to
and hence what as humans they are literally
able to do. Much of what many people now
think of as ‘social life’ could not be undertaken
without the flexibilities of the car and its
availability 24 hours a day. It is possible to
leave late by car, to miss connections, to
travel in a relatively time-less fashion. People
travel when they want to, along routes that
they choose, finding new places unexpectedly,
stopping for relatively open-ended periods of
time, and moving on when they desire.
But at the same time this flexibility is
necessitated by automobility. The ‘structure
of auto space’ (Freund 1993; Kunstler 1994)
forces people to orchestrate in complex and
heterogeneous ways their mobilities and
socialities across very significant distances.
The urban environment, built during the
latter half of the twentieth century for the
convenience of the car, has ‘unbundled’
territorialities of home, work, business, and
leisure. Members of families are split up since
they will live in distant places necessarily
involving complex travel to meet up
intermittently. People inhabit congestion,
jams, temporal uncertainties and healththreatening city environments, as a
consequence of being encapsulated in a
privatised, cocooned, moving capsule (see
Flink 1988; Whitelegg 1997; Miller 2000).
Automobility is thus a system in which
everyone is coerced into an intense flexibility. It
forces people to juggle tiny fragments of time
so as to deal with the temporal and spatial
constraints that it itself generates.
Automobility develops ‘instantaneous’ time to
be managed in highly complex, heterogeneous
and uncertain ways; there is an individualistic
timetabling of many instants or fragments of
time. The car system we might thus see as a
Frankenstein-created monster, extending the
individual into realms of freedom and
flexibility whereby inhabiting the car can be
positively viewed, but also constraining car
‘users’ to live their lives in spatially-stretched
and time-compressed ways. The car is the
‘iron cage’ of modernity, motorised, moving
and privatised. Automobility thus produces
desires for flexibility that only the car system
can satisfy.
But it is a key feature of complexity
approaches that nothing is fixed forever.
Abbott maintains that there is ‘the possibility
for a pattern of actions to occur to put the key
in the lock and make a major turning point
occur’ (Abbott 2001: 257). Such non-linear
outcomes are generated by systems moving
across turning or what Gladwell terms
tipping points (2000). Tipping points involve
three notions: that events and phenomena are
contagious, that little causes can have big
effects, and that changes can happen not in a
gradual linear way but dramatically at a
moment when the system switches. Gladwell
describes the consumption of fax machines or
mobile phones, when at a moment every office
needs a fax machine or every mobile person
needs a mobile. Wealth derives not from
scarcity as in conventional economics but
from abundance (Gladwell 2000: 272-3).
Thus the issue for the current car system is
whether a tipping point may occur when
suddenly the whole world turns its back on it.
What might complexity say about such a
possibility? It should be noted to start with
here that I have only considered one form of
the car and especially with how the ‘pathdependence’ of the privately owned and
mobilised ‘steel-and-petroleum’ car was
established and ‘locked’ in. Also we should
note that current thinking about what is to be
done about global automobility is
characterised by linear-thinking: can existing
cars can be given a small technical fix to
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increase fuel consumption or can existing
modes of public transport be improved and
take some business away from cars and roads.
But complexity would suggest that the real
challenge is how to move to a different
pattern; is there a tipping point analogous to
the history of the mobile phone, which fully
breaks with the current car-system?
Complexity surely shows that such a system
could not be disrupted by linear changes but
only by a set of interdependent small
transformations occurring in a certain order
that might move, or tip, the system into a new
path (see Sheller and Urry 2000; Gladwell
2000).
It is interesting to note that linear models are
critiqued on all sides, not only by theorists of
non-linear dynamics (Prigogine 1997; Nicolis
1995; Capra 1996, 2001) but also by
empirically oriented sociologists (see Abbott’s
critique of ‘generalised linear reality’; 2001).
According to Abbott ‘path-dependence’ shows
that ‘time matters’ (2001). It is a process
model in which systems develop irreversibly
through a ‘lock-in’ but with only certain small
causes being necessary to prompt their
initiation, as indeed with the unpredictable
origins of the petrol-based car (Mahoney
2000: 535-536). To break with the current
car-system (what Adams 1999, terms
‘business as usual’), we need to examine
‘turning points’.
Abbott argues that change is the normal
order of things and indeed many assessments
of contemporary social life emphasise the
increasingly accelerating nature of such
changes. But there are certain networks of
social relations that are amazingly stabilised
for long periods of time, what are often called
social structures. And one such structure is
the car-system that is remarkably stable and
unchanging. And this is so although a huge
economic, social and technological maelstrom
of change surrounds it (Abbott 2001: 256).
The car system one might say seems to sail
on regardless, well over a century old and
increasingly able to ‘drive’ out competitors,
such as feet, bikes, buses and trains. It is
increasingly out-of-date, unlike almost all
important domestic technologies of the
twentieth century, being based not on electric
power but oil-based combustion. The
twentieth century saw homes and garages
increasingly full of electric goods – except for
the oddly out-dated car.
I now note some small technical-economic,
policy and social changes that could just be
laying down the seeds of a new mobility for
the rest of this century. If they develop in the
next decade or so, then a turning point will be
reached through their systemic temporal
interdependencies. If they occur in the ‘right
order’, which we will probably only know in
retrospect, they will produce a new mobility,
the ‘post-car system’ (see Graham and Marvin
2001, for a different view).
These small changes include new fuel systems
including batteries, hybrid cars powered by
diesel and batteries, and hydrogen or
methanol fuel cells; new materials for
constructing ‘car’ bodies that will be many
times lighter; ‘smart-card’ technology to
transfer fares, charges, information from car,
to home, to bus, to train, to workplace, to web
site, to shop-till, to bank; the deprivatisation of
the car through extensive car-sharing, car
clubs and car-hire schemes; shifts in transport
policy away from predict and provide models;
and communications that are embedded within
and coterminous with forms of transport (see
inter alia Hawken, Lovins, Lovins 1999; US
Department of Transportation 1999;
Motavalli 2000; Thrift 2001; Vigar 2002).
This system of the ‘post-car’ would consist of
small, light, smart, probably hydrogen-based,
deprivatised ‘vehicles’ electronically and
physically integrated with many other forms
of mobility. In the post-car system there will
be a mixed flow of slow-moving semi-public
micro-cars, bikes, many hybrid vehicles,
pedestrians and mass transport integrated
into a mobility of physical and virtual access.
Electronic tolls will regulate access and speed.
Neighbourhoods will foster ‘access by
proximity’ through denser living patterns and
integrated land use, and promoting electronic
coordination between motorised and nonmotorised transport and between those ‘on
the move’ in many different ways (Hawken,
Lovins, Lovins 1999: 47; Sheller and Urry
2000).
Complexity approaches emphasise three
points here about such a shift away from the
current car system. First, the pattern of
‘public mobility’, of the dominance of buses,
9
trains, coaches and ships, will not be reestablished. That has been irreversibly lost
because of the self-expanding character of the
car system that has produced and necessitated
individualised mobility based upon
instantaneous time, fragmentation and
flexibility. Any post-car system will involve
the individualised movement that
automobility presupposes and brought into
being as an irreversible consequence of the
century of the car.
Second, the days of steel and petroleum
automobility are in fact numbered. By 2100 it
seems inconceivable that individualised
mobility will be based upon the nineteenth
century technologies of steel bodied cars and
petroleum engines. A tipping or turning point
will occur during the twenty first century
when the steel and petroleum car system will
finally be seen as a dinosaur (a bit like the
Soviet empire, early freestanding PCs or
immobile phones). When it is so seen then it
will be dispatched for good and no-one will
comprehend how such a large, wasteful and
planet-destroying creature could have ruled
the earth. Suddenly the system of
automobility will disappear and become like a
dinosaur housed in museums and we will
wonder what all the fuss was about.
Third, this tipping point is unpredictable. It
cannot be read off from linear changes in
existing firms, industries, practices and
economies. Just as the internet and the mobile
phone came from ‘nowhere’, so the tipping
point towards the ‘post car’ will emerge
unpredictably. It will probably arrive from a
set of technologies or firms or governments
that are currently not a centre of the car
industry and culture, as with the Finnish
toilet paper maker Nokia and the unexpected
origins of the mobile phone.
4. Conclusion
I noted above how Prigogine analyses how
there are dissipative structures, islands of new
order within a sea of disorder, islands that
increase their order at the expense of greater
overall disorder. Prigogine describes how
each of these pockets of order ‘floats in
disorder’ (cited Capra 1996: 184). And such
localised order involve processes of selfmaking.
I have then examined the global car system as
a leading example of ‘global complexity’. In
particular, automobility is one of those
‘islands of order’ and as a ‘turbulent flow’ it
has proceeded to generate greater entropy or
disorder across the globe.
Complexity is also the starting point for
examining how this global system that seems
so unchangeable, may through small changes,
if they occur in a certain order, tip it into a
post car mobility system. And when exactly
the car does become a dinosaur fit for
museums will determine the long-term
viability of many aspects of life on ‘earth’.
And I suggest this will have happened by the
end of this century. But predicting though
when exactly this will happen is impossible
although this paper has argued that the
categories of complexity are the way to
examine how such possibilities may develop
and intersect and how a system that seems
utterly intractable may just one day turn over
and die.
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