Encountering diversity does nothing for the global system of the city unless that encounter has a change of altering your behaviour. There has to be feedback between agents, cells that change in response to the changes in other cells. At sixty-five miles an hour, the information transmitted between agents is too limited for such subtle interactions, just as it would be in the ant world if a worker ant suddenly began to hurtle across the desert floor at ten times the speed of her neighbors.

(Johnson 2001:96)