Duncan Xavier Haddock

What is this Website?

This site is where I catalog my reading and learning about the complex world around us. My current interests sit at the intersection of urban systems and the structural changes a sustainable society would demand — what a green energy transition would require of labor and existing infrastructure, how urban design can foster community rather than atomize it, and what incentives might push cities toward more holistic approaches to production, consumption, and waste. These threads pull on each other more than they stand apart, and part of what I want to do here is trace those connections.

How do we effectively model these changes? What happens to individual behavior when you put a grocery store in a neighborhood, pull a lane of traffic for a bike lane, or shift to more sustainable construction materials — and how do those changes scale? This site is where I work through those questions, using three mechanisms:

• Blog Exploratory thinking. Responses to readings, connections between ideas, reflections on talks and local issues.
• Journal Analytical work. Reproducing results from papers, working through datasets, building models.
• Projects A place to house designs and questions I'm working through.

Who am I?

By training, I am a physicist, a chemist, and a mathematician. I’ve synthesized novel structural polymers, modeled charge transport in organic semiconductors, and built analysis software for near-field infrared imaging. My background taught me how to work a problem from the material, to abstraction, down to something tangibly workable.

You may notice that this work is hardly related to the questions I’m asking here — quite astute. I left graduate school to focus on questions I felt closer to. Despite the work and intellectual endeavor being beautiful, I felt myself drawn to other problems. I came to the Santa Fe Institute, where I began to formalize the framework of complexity science that helped me understand those questions.

Outside of work, I spend time with mutual aid efforts and organizations such as Strong Towns — allowing me to help and advocate for my local communities and see the ways that our urban and societal structures fail people. Teaching yoga, playing and coaching, gardening, being in queer space — I love these communities I am part of, enough to want to understand why those that occupy them struggle and what it would look like for them to really thrive.

If you would like to see more of me and the work I care about, give a look here:

• More of Me