GCPH Seminar Series 7: Professor Max Boisot - The City as a Complex Adaptive System: Lessons from the ATLAS Experiment at the LHC

The first seminar in this Series took place on Thursday 18 November 2010 at the Lighthouse. The ATLAS Collaboration will conduct experiments at the very edge of science, using one of four detectors located on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The Collaboration consists of over 3000 scientist working in over 174 research institutes and universities located in 38 countries around the globe. In such a complex and spatially extended network (what we would today call a complex adaptive system) how do the knowledge flows allow the creation of one of the most sophisticated technological objects ever built? Drawing on a conceptual framework, the Information-Space or I-Space, Max Boisot described and tried to make sense of the ATLAS collaboration’s culture. He explored the lessons that the management of globally distributed ‘big science’ projects such as the ATLAS collaboration hold for other complex adaptive systems such as cities.