If success in urban planning was measured by impact, advances in technology, such as electricity, plumbing, and transportation, are arguably the most successful urban planning…

A couple of weeks ago, we were given the task to map out a complex system of our own choice. A small side effect of Donella Meadow’s ”Thinking in Systems” is that you start to think of everything around you as a system. Excited by this thought I set out to map the system of love between two people. When I was finished, I looked at the result thinking that it looked too simple and too clean. And a similar feeling came over me when I saw the systems that my classmates had made. Certainly, these system diagrams where only models but I still could not help but feeling that they were deceiving everyone that looked at them.

In an attempt to explain Beirut city trends from a system thinking perspective, I bow to the nighthawks of the city and to Gregory Buchakjian (my inspiration for the title).

Read Donella Meadows’s Thinking In Systems and you can’t help but notice how just about everything connects to a scheme, intentional or not. For instance,…