#57: Cities Won't Save Us
"Planning Principle I: When in doubt, plant a tree." This critique of traditional urbanism by architectural theorist Lars Lerup (in a book appropriately called After the City) is a useful reminder that the practice of urban planning, as we know it, too often addresses the most limited or superficial aspects of the lived urban experience. After financial capital, wealthy homeowners, corporate interests, the Koch brothers, law enforcement, and cultural inertia have had their way, there's frequently not much left for the urbanists to do except, well, plant a tree (or perform an equally decorative intervention). I remembered Lerup's joke after reading this recent article by Justin Davidson (to which I linked last time) about Nashville as an example of contemporary urbanism's pyrrhic victory in so many American downtowns: "Faraway private equity firms have hijacked urbanists’ agenda, bringing forth a kind of metropolitan version of Westworld: a place that looks like a city but isn’t." Countless avatars of this new approach to cities, from Sidewalk Labs to Ed Glaeser, proclaim that cities will somehow save the world, but in a world urbanizing this fast, what does that even mean? Cities are the world.
Chris Beiser posted a similarly trenchant thread yesterday about how urbanism discourse is failing—attracting so many smart people yet failing to produce many results that differ from what would have happened anyway: "Nobody is working on new principles, new theory, new interventions." He's not wrong. Jane Jacobs wrote the urbanism bible sixty years ago, decisively overthrowing modernism's dominance of the field, and there's almost nothing we've come up with since then that meaningfully challenges or transcends her ideas. We've mostly just assimilated new technology into her orthodoxy. Urbanism has reached its end-of-history moment, which, as we we learned with American politics two years ago, is a dangerous place to be.
Our key fallacy, or one of them, is a bias toward the physical, the visible, and the built environment—streets, block sizes, building heights—with a relative, though not absolute, disregard for the unseen forces that generate those outcomes. Overheated urban housing markets are a perfect example of this misdirection: We obsess over zoning and building heights while failing to adequately grapple with the market conditions and political realities that will foil and undermine real success—because, quite frankly, the actual operation of real estate and politics are beyond urban planning's scope of influence (again, urbanists are scavenging for whatever's left after every other sector has its turn). Architecture, unlike urbanism (to the extent that the two fields are different), has at least attempted to theorize its way out of that bind and better understand its place in the world. Sanford Kwinter once wrote, "The organization of a given economy and society...is what first invented and now drives and shapes the concrete constellations that we call cities." Cities will get better to the extent that we get better. Meanwhile, we can keep planting trees.
I posted this to the blog earlier in the week, about how withholding personal data is personally edifying and a form of consumer surplus.
Reads:
Space is full of dirty, toxic grease (the equivalent of 40 trillion trillion trillion packs of butter).
Internet-of-things vulnerability: Hackers stole a casino's high-roller database via a fishtank thermometer in the lobby.
SimCity had to pretend all its parking lots were underground because the game would have been too boring if surface parking was realistically represented.
Until next time,
Drew