The city thinks about only for its own good. It is evolving like a ‘selfish gene’, the term used by Richard Dawkins. He also coins the term ‘meme’ for a unit of human cultural evolution analogous to the gene, suggesting that such ‘selfish’ replication may also model human culture. Just like a gene, there is no city that looks after or considers its neighbor; they only think about themselves.
In the information society of the twenty first century, the most valuable resource will not be iron or oil but ‘culture’. Everything you can see in present days is inherited from the past. In this sense, the city itself is an accumulation of culture. The fundamental concept is the meme, analogous to the gene in biological genetics, an element of culture that can be the basis of culture variation, selection, and evolution. It grows like trees, branches to branches.
The city will absorb everything towards the center, and will grow by doing it repeatedly. Interestingly, the ‘selfish’ action of cities leads to ‘unselfish’ actions by organisms of society.
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