Cities can be understood as a network of systems. According to Dana Meadows, “a system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something”. Important in this definition are the emphasis on three key concepts: elements, interconnections, and function/purpose.

As a method of organization, system has two primary means of navigation; scale and adaptability. Taken together, the performance of these mechanisms form the basis of the relative health of a system. Systems that can negotiate nimbly across scale and adapt to changing circumstances will prevail over those that do not, enhancing their resilience. Cities accomplish this through the use of districts.

A product of time is the development of feedback loops, which perform a similar role in systems that memory does in people. In cities, feedback loops are both a driver of how systems respond to future change - how they learn, but also manifest as the physical fabric of a place, forming a significant part of it’s identity.

Situated in Savannah, Georgia, this thesis seeks to analyze the relationship between scale and memory within systems in order to understand their effect on the health of districts, specifically as it relates to their role as functional frameworks of daily living, repositories of culture, and power brokers between scales within cities.