Emergence and New York’s SoHo Neighborhood

Emergence is what allows a complex system to become more than the sum of its parts. It’s the outcome of interactions within the systems itself along with the relationship that the system has with its environment. In short, Emergence is what allows order emerge out of chaos.

When walking through New York’s SoHo neighborhood, it’s sometimes difficult to phantom that this area was once destined to house the Lower Manhattan Expressway—two elevated highways designed to connect Manhattan’s west and east arteries. The plan was scrapped in the late 1960s following public protests, allowing SoHo to instead become home of the city’s bustling art scene.

There was nothing predetermined about this change of directions. There was no grand plan, no city ordinance, and no zoning decision that established SoHo as it exists today. The neighborhood emerged—as neighborhoods often do—seemingly by chance and over a longer period of time.

Neighborhood transformations like the one just described are examples of Emergence—a concept perhaps best understood as the way in which order can seemingly arise out of chaos. In Systems Theory, it’s what allows systems to self-organize and become more than the sum of their parts. It’s the synergetic effect that allows complexity to emerge from relatively simple interactions.

Consider the following two examples:

  • Social networking websites provide functionality that enable people to interact. But they have little control over when or why those interactions take place. Networks covering topics as diverse as folk music, long-distance running, and video games, emerge spontaneously from seemingly disparate pieces of functionality.
  • Stock markets are notoriously unpredictable, but it’s somewhat surprising that they aren’t more chaotic. They have no leadership (only regulators) and they are influenced by the actions of millions of stakeholders—all with their own set of ambitions. Despite this, a balance emerges to ensure that crashes are relatively few and far between.

Emergence is, in other words, an outcome of collective behavior in relation to the environment. After all, one person does not make a social network and a stock market does not exist in isolation—it’s influenced by internal factors such as regulators and stakeholders as well as external ones such as interest rates, job markets, and party politics.

In hindsight, one can probably find several factors that are likely to have attributed to SoHo’s transformation. The lack of what was then considered suitable business property did, for example, keep neighborhood rents at a level suitable for the poverty-stricken artistry. This was undoubtedly important, but it’s unlikely that it alone can account for the transformation that took place. It’s, in fact, much more likely that it was a combination of factors—many of which were not readily observable at the time—that ultimately allowed SoHo to emerge as an archetype for gentrification.