Is the City Solvable?

Link to a reply I made recently to an article on the Urban Omnibus site regarding the NYTimes article on Geoffrey West, a physicist who has been exploring statistical methods of analyzing cities.

There's plenty of derision in the community of Urbanists regarding West's work. Much of it is well-deserved, in particular his ludicrous claims to have discovered the laws underlying all cities when what he has really uncovered are statistical correlations between size and various indicators of efficiency.

The more important issue relates to how we seek to understand cities. Fifty years ago, Jane Jacobs wrote about cities as problems of organized complexity, analogous to the problems of understanding complex biological organisms facing the Life Sciences. Unfortunately, most city planners and theorists approach cities as either simple problems of cause and effect (like elementary mechanics with simple mathematical solutions) or as problems of disorganized complexity (like thermodynamics, amenable to statistical analysis). Because they misunderstand the nature of the problem, they end up with wrong solutions. What is needed, posited Jacobs, is to approach the study of cities in a manner similar to how the Life Sciences have approached the study of biological organisms.

Unfortunately, hasn't been much progress. Have a century after Jacobs published "The Life and Death of Great American Cities," the study of cities is still largely dominated by architects and social scientists. Much good work has been done, but "we have hardly made the sort of progress that the life sciences have over the last fifty years in developing a practical and useful understanding of the complex systems that make up urban life."

(For an excerpt from Jane Jacob's writing on organized complexity, go here.)

Egypt's Urban Challenge

More evidence of the groundswell rising around cities in this NYTimes article about Egypt's urbanization. The only major country in the world to see it's urbanization level decline over the last 30 years (from 44% to 43%, compared to East Asia which increased from 26% to 50% over the same time), Egypt faces the challenge of revitalizing its urban centres. The article argues that this will be a key to getting the Egyptian economy back on track.

Living PlanIT

Interesting article in Fast Company about Living PlanIT, the technology company trying to create an "urban operating system" and building a city in Portugal to try it out.

They're doing some very interesting stuff - and a lot of the same things we're looking at in India. Their approach to the construction industry is particularly interesting, and potentially transformative. I also agree with Eccles' analysis towards the end that architects and urban planners are missing the boat by not engaging with the business and technology community.

However, as interesting as their ideas are, I think the city as operating system idea goes too far when you start thinking that the technology platform is the raison d'être of the city. People come together in urban agglomerations as a part of much larger and much more fundamental social and economic transformations. There are only a few places in the world today with the sort of growth and change going on to feasibly talk about building new cities -- China, India, a few places in Africa... the list is pretty short and it doesn't include western Europe.

Learning to Live With Climate Change

Very thought-provoking article from Wired a couple of years ago regarding the futility of trying to stop climate change. Basic idea is that we've already gone too far. The amount of emissions in the air is already so high that climate change is inevitable. Throw in the political inability to make the sort of massive changes in behavior that would be required just to stabilize, let alone reduce our emissions, and we need to start planning for how to cope with the different climate.

Random Post: Yun Jung-Hee

Loved this article about South Korean actress Yun Jung-Hee in the NYTimes. Gorgeous piece of writing about her newest movie, Poetry, and her career, which spanned 330 films from 1967-1994. This is her first movie since retiring in '94.

She plays a pensioner struggling to learn to write poetry while suffering the onset of dementia.

“To Mi-ja, writing poems is important because she’s discovering the meaning of the world,” Mr. Lee [the director] said. “The paradox of her life is that she’s leaving the world and forgetting the words.”

The Cities Programme at LSE

Starting the Masters program in City Design and Social Science at LSE on the 27th. What exactly is "City Design and Social Science"? Good question. Here's an interview with the director of the Cities Programme (with an extra "-me" because it's in London), Dr. Fran Tonkiss.

The key takeway:

"There are two ways of understanding our commitment to the concept of city design. Firstly and most simply, our approach differs from an idea of urban design as primarily concerned with the public realm, or with ‘the space between buildings’. While such spaces form part of our focus, our interest is less with specific design interventions than with larger processes of city-making, not only through the practice of design but through policy and planning, the economics of development, and environmental and infrastructure strategies. This links to the second point, which is the defining character of the Cities Programme approach: our central concern with the relationship between the social and the physical production of urban space. For us, cities are always understood as social as well as physical forms. The two parts of the equation are equally important: the focus on city design as an integrated process, and the value of social science – sociology, economics, geography, planning and public policy – in the analysis of how cities are made, and how they can be made better."

3rd Ward

Very cool article in the NYTimes about an urban artisans collective in Brooklyn called 3rd Ward. Communal design and fabrication facilities, classes, studio space. Amazing for both the creative community it's brought together and also that it's become a successful business model. Would this work in Mumbai??