The Santa Fe Institute’s economic and geographical influence on the computational bent of complexity sciences

Abstract

Complexity sciences are a multidisciplinary and transnational field of study that aims at modeling natural, artificial, and social “complex systems.” In most complexity institutes in the world, the only in-house infrastructures are computational in nature, while physical, chemical, biological, and behavioral science instrumentation is a rare exception. This article asks how complexity sciences became computational in the first place and offers two explanations. Firstly, the economic dynamics of the institute influenced the founders’ original funding goals and restricted their resources for facility budgets. Secondly, the archives of the Santa Fe Institute – cradle of the complexity label – show that, as a consequence of budget constraints, the research center had to move its final headquarters in a residential area in the outskirts of the town. Before its installation there, the neighbors and the local administration opened up a public controversy and prevented the SFI from building potentially noxious experimental facilities. A diversity of material causes thus informed the computational identity of complexity sciences, which is reflected in SFI-like institutes around the world.