The Buddha's last words: Energy, simplicity and the resilience of urban systems

TL;DRAbstract

The increasing complexity of the interconnected urban systems that make developed cities possible also poses technical and theoretical challenges to the resilience of those systems. Contributing to the wide body of work on systems theory and the complexity of systems, this paper applies the work of historian Joseph Tainter to the field of urban resilience by examining his claim that societies are problem-solving machines that meet the challenges they face by implementing increasingly complex solutions. While this approach has been, and remains, extremely successful, the path of increasing social complexity is dependent upon access to growing sources of energy without which such systems cannot increase or maintain their own complexity (1990; 1995). This is not a new discovery of course; in the final (possibly apocryphal) words of the Buddha: 'All compound things decay'. Disasters can interrupt the complex networks of power generation and distribution that make possible both the maintena

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