The city as organisation

We're used to talk of confusing the map and the territory, and the extract below reminded me of the parallels between a modern city and a modern (corporate) organisation - of course a city is an organisation too, though a city is more obviously a complex adaptive system - as in this discussion of Calvino's Invisible Cities.

For me, the point is that megalomaniac managers still think they can dominate the organisation just because they have the org chart and strategic plan and performance statistics in front of them, and paranoiac employees still think that they are powerless because of their place in the hierarchy and because their e-mails are being monitored.

Here's the piece from The Future of Cities blog which originates in Liz Carey-Libbrecht's translation of Paris: Ville Invisible.

"Megalomaniacs confuse the map and the territory and think they can dominate all of Paris just because they do, indeed, have all of Paris before their eyes. Paranoiacs confuse the territory and the map and think they are dominated, observed, watched, just because a blind person absent-mindedly looks at some obscure signs in a four-by-eight metre room in a secret place. Both take the cascade of transformations for information, and twice they miss that which is gained and that which is lost in the jump from trace to trace – the former on the way down, the latter on the way up. Rather imagine two triangles, one fitted into the other: the base of the first, very large, gets smaller as one moves up to the acute angle at the top: that's the loss; the second one, upside down in the first, gets progressively bigger from the point to the base: that's the gain. If we want to represent the social, we have to get used to replacing all the double-click information transfers by cascades of transformations. To be sure, we'll lose the perverted thrill of the megalomaniacs and the paranoiacs, but the gain will be worth the loss.
(...)
The more information spreads and the more we can track our attachments to others, since everywhere cables, forms, plugs, sensors, exchangers, translators, bridges, packets, modems, platforms and compilers become visible and expensive – with the price tag still attached to them. the reader will perhaps forgive us for our myopic obsession with the trails of traces."