Sprawl and cities, Part 1
In a lengthy post Part 1 and Part 2) reviewing Robert Bruegmann’s seminal Sprawl: A Compact History, I promised to return to his tidbits about cities.
Content-rich blogs taste as good as content-free: promise!
From humanity’s earliest civilizations we have imagined the ideal city, sometimes celestial, sometimes architecturally perfect Renaissance:
View of the
That image of antiseptic perfection animates not only architects like Le Corbusier but also urban theorists like the late Lewis Mumford (1895-1990), author of The City in History, the dean of the anti-sprawl polemicists,
Lewis Mumford and his daughter
who wrote:
Whilst the suburb served only a favored minority it neither spoiled the countryside nor threatened the city. But now that the drift to the outer ring has become a mass movement [1958! — Ed.], it tends to destroy the value of both environments without producing anything but a dreary substitute, devoid of form and even more devoid of the original suburban values.
A new kind of community was produced which caricatured both the historic city and the archetypal suburban refuge: a multitude of uniform unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every respect to a common mold. (The City in History, page 506, quoted by Bruegmann on page 134)
Yet, as Jane Jacobs also wrote in Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), cities are inherently messy, and to eliminate their riotous chaos is to kill them (1992):
Jane Jacobs, circa 1965
I realized I was engaged in studying the ecology of cities.
By city ecology I mean something different from, yet similar to, natural ecology as students of wilderness address the subject. A natural ecosystem is defined as “composed of physical-chemical-biological processes active within a space-time unit of any magnitude.” A city ecosystem is composed of physical-economic-ethical processes active at a given time within a city and its close dependencies. I’ve made up this definition, by analogy.
I came across this quote only last week, and it’s satisfying to see how Jacobs’ descriptions of city ecosystems sound like AHI’s on housing finance ecosystems. To continue with Jacobs:
The two sorts of ecosystems — one created by nature, the other by human beings –have fundamental principles in common. For instance, both types of ecosystems –assuming they are not barren — require much diversity to sustain themselves. In both cases, the diversity develops organically over time, and the varied components are interdependent in complex ways. The more niches for diversity of life and livelihoods in either kind of ecosystem, the greater its carrying capacity for life.
Here’s an argument for tenure and income diversity even within the residential sector.
In both types of ecosystems, many small and obscure components –easily overlooked by superficial observation — can be vital to the whole, far out of proportion to their own tininess of scale or aggregate quantities. In natural ecosystems, gene pools are fundamental treasures. In city ecosystems, kinds of work are fundamental treasures; furthermore, forms of work not only reproduce themselves in newly created proliferating organizations, they also hybridize, and even mutate into unprecedented kinds of work. And because of their complex interdependencies of components, both kinds of ecosystems are vulnerable and fragile, easily disrupted or destroyed.
If not fatally disrupted, however, they are tough and resilient. And when their processes are working well, ecosystems appear stable. But in a profound sense, the stability is an illusion.
Neighborhoods, like rock, are always coming or going, never in perfect stasis.
As a Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, observed long ago, everything in the natural world is in flux. When we suppose we see static situations, we actually see processes of beginning and processes of ending occurring simultaneously.
Nothing is static. It is the same with cities. Thus, to investigate either natural or city ecosystems demands the same kind of thinking. It does not do to focus on “things” and expect them to explain much in themselves. Processes are always of the essence; things have significances as participants in processes, for better or worse.
[…]
Cities are in a sense natural ecosystems too — for us. They are not disposable. Whenever and wherever societies have flourished and prospered rather than stagnated and decayed, creative and workable cities have been at the core of the phenomenon; they have pulled their weight and more. It is the same still. Decaying cities, declining economies, and mounting social troubles travel together. The combination is not coincidental.
Just as the Platonic garden is always blooming, so the ideal city has no poor neighborhoods, no deteriorating buildings, no empty lots. Such a city, however exquisitely preserved, is exquisitely embalmed:
“The memory banks store the image of the city itself, holding its every atom rigid against all the changes that time can bring.
“Diaspar has survived and come safely down the ages, like a great ship carrying as its cargo all that is left of the human race. It is a tremendous achievement in social engineering, though whether it is worth doing is quite another matter.”
– Arthur C. Clarke, The City and the Stars, page 43
[Continued tomorrow in Part 2]
