This headline/article was in today’s The Overhead Wire, “Complex urban streets encourage safer driving.” Yeah, when you take the complex river and stuff the water flow into a culvert it reduces the complexity and the energy is drained quicker… adding complexity keeps the energy stored in the system/network/place. This is stated in the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, as analysed by James Howard Kunstler in his fourth non-fiction book, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century,

“... ordered flows drain entropy at a faster rate than complex disordered flows. Hence, the creation of ever more efficient ordered flows in American society, the removal of constraints, has accelerated the winding down of American potential, which is exactly why a Wal-Mart economy will bring us to grief more rapidly than a national agglomeration of diverse independent small-town economies. Efficiency is the straightest path to hell. (p.191)”

Yes, the more complex a river, a street, an economy, and our lives are, then the more energy we have within them to savor, enjoy, and experience them. It’s when we’re shopping in a Wal*Mart, walking along a box culvert creek, driving on a freeway, and being isolated do we more quickly entropy and lose our energy. Now, that doesn’t mean we thrive in chaos and disorder, we need both. But not just one or the other. In places of great chaos, more order achieves thermodynamic balance. In other places of great order, more chaos helps it achieve its equilibrium. This achieving equilibrium, between complexity and simplicity / chaos and order, is the basis of my economic, environmental, and social equity philosophy.