Organism. In biology an organism is a contiguous living system, such as a vertebrate, insect, plant or bacterium. All known types of organism are capable of some degree of response to stimuli, reproduction, growth and development and self-regulation. (Wikipedia)

 

"we will explore the city as the most complex human-made “organism” with a metabolism that can be modeled in terms of stocks and flows."

 

What do they mean when they said "contiguous living system?" and in the quote above is it really, in a sense, right to say that a city is "the most complex human-made 'organism' with...?"

With contiguous they mean it is a cohesive unit (which, if you delve deep into the subcellular level can get a bit complicated). With the city I presume that mostly use it as an analogy. A city obviously is not an organism or living per se but you can build a narrative to draw parallels.

Part of the reason they make the contiguous distinction may be to exclude clones as "an organism". For example, there are populations of plants (and, i think, simple animals) which are all genetically identical. But because they are physically separate, they are counted as individual organisms.

Edited October 10, 201411 yr by Strange

But there are a lot of in-betweeners in the microbe world, so in many cases it is kind of arbitrary (as many convenient distinctions are in biology).