Statistics such as a country’s gross domestic product or a city’s population size represent organizational and individual decisions over time. These figures are useful for policymaking, but they hide the complexity that stems from regional variations in choice.
Program Postdoctoral Fellow Jordan Kemp hopes to leverage the richness of urban-growth data by capturing patterns of behaviors among different groups at various scales, from the individual to the population level. “Historically, researchers sought to develop universal models,” Kemp says. “To connect these models to individual experiences, we need to measure and understand local differences.”
Kemp approaches growth as an adaptive process: a result of decision-making that varies by place and context, with large-scale implications. Under the theme of emergent engineering, his research at SFI will draw on fields like ecology that have developed methods for tracking how populations grow and change over time. He seeks to build a common language that connects both individual agency and systemic forces to help make human systems more resilient to future challenges.
“For the sake of policymaking, it's important not just to understand the state of the world, but also to understand how it relates to underlying processes of choice in changing environments,” Kemp says. “Existing disciplines can each tell us pieces of that puzzle, but complex systems can help us understand how they come together.”
SFI External Professor Luís Bettencourt advised Kemp during his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Chicago, where he studied adaptive growth and cooperation. At SFI, Kemp will work with SFI President David Krakauer and Professors Chris Kempes and Cris Moore to carry forward the work from his Ph.D., as well as his recent postdoc at INET Oxford, where he worked with SFI External Professor J. Doyne Farmer to use growth to study compositional changes in urban data.