The Atlas of Social Complexity
Brian Castellani and Lasse Gerrits
This book gets at the central insight that drives our approach to complexity: complex human systems require transdisciplinary inquiry for practice. No single discipline (even complexity science) is sufficient to fully understand and guide responses to complex human systems, which are not human-centred but a mesh of eco-socio-techno-systems.
What physical-computational approaches to complexity miss is the meaning-making of humans: a multiplicity of overlapping, shifting interactions of power, identity, values, goals and histories. This book points to an emerging but underexplored critical and social science turn in complexity and complex systems thinking, one that must grapple seriously with the social, cultural and political context in which complex systems operate.
The result is an urgent case for connecting fields and practices that can hold more useful, if always partial, pictures together. There is much more to say here; this gap is precisely what House of Complexity exists in response to. Expect to see more soon.
“An easy illustration of this is the failure of most complexity scientists to engage with the sociological, political and anthropological literature around relations of power. The result is a gross misunderstanding of how complex social systems such as political arenas, neighbourhoods, businesses, economies and social groups actually work. Such systems are replete with self organising patterns of structural dominance, oppression, exploitation, violence, irrationality, conflict and inequality, which can only be understood by pulling in the relevant insights from adjacent fields.”
Steven Sullivan
Strategic Design Director
