How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg & Dan Gardner

Author:Bent Flyvbjerg & Dan Gardner [Flyvbjerg, Bent & Gardner, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2023-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

SCALE-FREE SCALABILITY

Notice that I’m not using precise numbers. That’s because the numbers can be scaled up or down as much as you like—from one to infinity and back again—without changing the character of the whole, much the same way that a flock of starlings is a flock of starlings and behaves like a flock of starlings whether it is made of fifty birds, five hundred, or five thousand. The technical term for this property is “scale free,” meaning that the thing is basically the same no matter what size it is. This gives you the magic of what I call “scale-free scalability,” meaning you can scale up or down following the same principles independently of where you are scalewise, which is exactly what you want in order to build something huge with ease. The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, who first laid out the science of scale-free scalability, called this attribute “fractal”—like one of those popular Internet memes in which you see a pattern, then zoom into a detail within the pattern and discover that it looks the same as the pattern as a whole, and you keep zooming in and keep discovering the same pattern.[11]

Modularity can do astonishing things. When the Covid pandemic first emerged in China in January 2020, a company that makes modular housing modified an existing room design and cranked out units in a factory. Nine days later, a thousand-bed hospital with fourteen hundred staff opened in Wuhan, ground zero of the outbreak. Other, bigger hospitals went up almost as fast.[12] Hong Kong did something similar to build quarantine facilities, preparing a site and assembling a thousand units of comfortable, fully equipped modern housing in four months. When the government later decided that anyone coming into Hong Kong would have to spend twenty-one days in quarantine, the facility was quickly expanded to thirty-five hundred units with room for seven thousand people. All the units can be disconnected and set up elsewhere—or put into storage.[13]

The obvious objection is that modules may be fine for emergencies and utilities such as server farms, but they’re cheap and ugly and aren’t suitable for anything more permanent and public. There’s something to that view. Much of what passed for modular housing in previous generations was indeed cheap and ugly. But that doesn’t mean it had to be. Some modular housing was considerably better than that, notably Sears Modern Homes. For much of the first half of the twentieth century, Americans could open a Sears, Roebuck catalog, order a house, and have a complete factory-built kit delivered. All the parts were included, with instructions for assembly, like IKEA furniture on a grand scale. Sears sold around seventy thousand kits. Many of the buildings are still standing 90, 100, or 110 years later and are prized for their high-quality construction and classic design.[14] And that was a century ago. Modern information and manufacturing technology make so much more possible, and easier, today.

When I spoke with Mike Green, he was working on an app that would

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