Complex Questions for the Study of Urban Agglomerations

This thesis attempts to construct a framework for answering perennial questions about urban agglomerations, called the Cooperative Capital framework. It takes the view of the city as complex system and relates the process of urban agglomeration to the city’s adaptive capability. It illustrates how the benefits of proximity are not simply reductions in the costs of moving goods, people, and information but, also in how it allows the exploratory recombination of the means of production and, relatedly, the reassociation of people. In contrast to firm-based theories of agglomeration, this thesis emphasizes that firms are transitory, and sometimes intermediate, forms of human organization, and thus argues that the city itself should be the fundamental unit of analysis for studying urban agglomerations. The cooperative capital of a cooperative system is the arrangement of components that reduce four barriers – trust, communication, transportation, computation – allowing many strangers to live in proximity peacefully and productively.M.A.S