#99: Range Life
When you suddenly start hearing a phrase like “Burning Man urbanism” you don’t get to enjoy it for very long, because it’s obvious that the reason it’s circulating won’t be good. In this case, the reason was that Paul Romer finally attended Burning Man, an adventure that Emily Badger amusingly documented in the New York Times yesterday. Romer, a Nobel Prize winner and former World Bank chief economist, has been floating questionable urbanist ideas for a while, but his trip to the Nevada desert was even more facile. The main lesson Romer learned there, apparently, is that the rapid global urbanization currently underway will be overly chaotic without a bit of urban planning. “Mr. Romer’s answer is to do…what Burning Man does every summer: Stake out the street grid; separate public from private space; and leave room for what’s to come. Then let the free market take over. No market mechanism can ever create the road network that connects everyone. The government must do that first.”
Burning Man urbanism, here, is a response to the event’s anarchic origins, the imposition of sufficient structure (physical and otherwise) to make it safe enough “that people can joke about dying without actually dying.” This isn’t really a lesson so much as an obvious if bizarrely articulated development. In general, Romer’s interpretation of his experience reflects a fallacy that pervades so much urban planning: the belief that a place’s spatial layout can determine the social activity that happens there. Burning Man is an annual week-long gathering of 70,000 relatively like-minded and affluent people from around the world; the urbanizing margins of the world’s megacities are in many ways the opposite. It’s not enough to say that both need street grids or “planning,” nor to assume that what works for one temporarily will work for the other permanently. The urbanism Romer describes, in fact, largely amounts to festival logistics, and could just as appropriately be called Coachella urbanism.
Speaking of festivals, there is another, more compelling version of Burning Man urbanism than Romer’s streetscapes: the temporary settlements and semi-nomadic existence enabled by our contemporary combination of digital connectivity and high-speed transportation. The ability of tens of thousands of people to converge and disperse in an orderly fashion—for a music festival or conference or something else—is a form of urbanism in the purest sense, one that can’t be separated from the global infrastructure that makes it possible. Despite the significant negative impacts of that infrastructure, the social arrangements it enables are fascinating and underappreciated, the rightful objects of a futurism for the 21st century. Meanwhile, on the other hand, capitalism enjoys the same mobility, infiltrating spaces and subcultures that it previously found inaccessible and transforming Black Rock City itself into a heterotopia for CEOs. Maybe the real Burning Man urbanism is the fact that Paul Romer actually attended.
Reads:
Waze Hijacked LA in the Name of Convenience. An interesting look at the gamelike process by which the large community of Waze map editors classifies road segments and influences traffic routing patterns.
Tokyo’s 2D Cafe, designed to make the real, three-dimensional world look like a flat illustration.