Street Oceanography: An Oceanographic Epistemology of Socio-Cultural Dynamical Systems - Preliminary Discussion

Abstract

A street is studied at present as a physical form, a transport link, a commercial location, a public space, a social setting, and a cultural landscape. Each description is well developed, and each treats as background what another treats as its object, which leaves the composite object without a field of its own. This paper gives a preliminary account of the foundations such a field would require, borrowing from oceanography a disciplinary form in place of a set of equations: a field organised around one object, admitting whatever method that object requires, and holding transport, composition, reaction, ecology, deposition and external coupling within a single account. The paper undertakes five foundational tasks. It fixes the object and its boundary, and states the premise of reciprocal alteration from which the field departs, namely that both the flow and the terrain are heterogeneous and that each alters the other. It sets out the discipline governing the borrowing, admitting a feature of the source field where it brings a theorem or a measurable, and records the standing of each feature on a graded and revisable scale. It identifies four respects in which the object departs from an ocean, which is what indicates a field in place of an application. It maps the field into nine domains of question and nine classes of instrument, gives the correspondence between them, and treats the empty cells of that correspondence as the research agenda. And it states the terms on which the proposal could fail, naming five null accounts any finding must defeat and giving the classification by which the field would first be tested. Three further results bear on practice: the obstructions that keep models of this class hard to deploy, the argument that governance reaches generativity only through susceptibility and the conditions of generation, and the distributive and reflexive questions that acting on conditions raises.