Nothing here
...can consider Hong Kong in these terms. Developing from a small, sleepy fishing village, Hong Kong has experienced certain momentous events, like the injection of Western influence by British colonization, mass immigration from the mainland in the 40s & 60s and from Vietnam in the 80s, and destruction caused by typhoons. These kind of events have rapidly stretched the city beyond the capacity of its physical and social limitations during the past century. Yet through self-organizing and adaptive ways of different individuals or systems, Hong Kong sustained itself and evolved into a major port with an international and regional airport, a primary financial and business centre hosting a community of people from world-wide backgrounds and a sought after destination for the world-aware tourist. The city of Hong Kong is now a mass of intricately interlocking subsystems, like the sand pile on the "edge of chaos", with metabolic rates of all speeds adjusting and rearranging the system just often enough to keep it poised on the edge of stability and chaos. Old events metastasize to give space for new events by means of self-adaptation without any giant master planning. This is notable in an era when many architects and city planners have been obsessed with producing giant master plans. Let us consider some of the adaptive moves within a few of the subsystems such as: housing, merchandising and socializing. Perhaps these kinds of interacting links and correlations can be studied more by understanding biological ecosystems: if the frog develops a longer tongue, the fly has to learn how to escape faster or produce a chemical to make itself more distasteful, which then in turn induces the frog has to learn how to tolerate that taste. In any case, the "edge of chaos" cannot be achieved by a single or a few contributions. It arises from the dance of co-evolution, as each individual constantly tries to adapt to all the others - economical, political, social, cultural, environmental and architectural. We are living in a sand pile called Hong Kong and while the examples of the above subsystems may show how continuous adaptation can balance the pace of rapid growth, we can not ignore the aspect of danger in existing at "the edge of chaos". reality tells us that the cadence of our life is always interrupted by different punctuation points - bursts of activities where grains of sand keep tumbling around us (e.g. stock market crashes, immigrations waves, government change). T...