unresolved, liberating spaces can, however, be designed.
The Closed System and the Brittle City
The cities everyone wants to live in should be clean and safe, possess efficient public services, be supported by a dynamic economy, provide cultural stimulation, and also do their best to heal society’s divisions of race, class and ethnicity. These are not the cities we live in.
Cities fail on all these counts due to government policy, irreparable social ills, and economic forces beyond local control. In these ways, each city is not its own master. Still, something has gone wrong – radically wrong – in our conception of what a city itself should be. Imagining the good city became ever more difficult as planning become legalistic and bureaucratic after World War II – Paris in 1960 had a far thicker rulebook than it did in 1870. This presents a paradox.
Today’s planner has an arsenal of technological tools – from lighting to bridging and tunnelling to materials for buildings – which urbanists even a hundred years ago could not begin to imagine: we have more resources to use than in the past, but we don’t use these resources very creatively.
This paradox can be traced to one big fault: the overdetermination of both the city’s visual forms and its social functions. The technologies which make possible experimentation have been subordinated to a regime of power which wants order and control; in the grip of rigid images and precise delineations, the urban imagination lost its vitality. Now, nearly a century on, with even greater technical abilities, we need to loosen up the city; we need to imagine an open city in which experimentation is possible, one which is friendly to informality, one which is open.
A portent of the paralysed imagination about cities appeared in Le Corbusier’s ‘Plan Voisin’ in the mid-1920s for Paris. The architect conceived of replacing a large swath of the historic centre of Paris with uniform, X-shaped buildings; public life on the ground plane of the street would be eliminated; the use of all buildings would be coordinated by a single master plan.
‘Plan Voisin’ froze the city by eliminating unregulated life at street level; instead, people were to live and work, in isolation, higher up. This vertical dystopic experiment became reality in various ways. The plan’s methodology shaped public housing from Chicago to Moscow, housing estates which came to resemble warehouses for the poor. Corbusier’s intended destruction of vibrant street life was realised in suburban growth for the middle classes, with the replacement of high streets by monofunctional shopping malls, by gated communities, by schools and hospitals built as isolated campuses.
The result of overdetermination is what could be called the Brittle City. As their use changes, buildings are now destroyed rather than adapted. The average lifespan of new public housing in Britain is now forty years; the average lifespan of new skyscrapers in New York is thirty-five years. It might seem that the Brittle City represents openness of a sort, the new sweeping away the old, but change of this sort is malign. In the United States, people flee decaying suburbs rather than reinvest in them; in Britain and continental Europe, as in America, ‘renewing’ the inner city most often means displacing the people who have lived there before. ‘Growth’ in an urban environment is a more complicated phenomenon than simple replacement of what existed before; growth requires a dialogue between past and present, it is a matter of evolution rather than erasure.
This principle is as true socially as it is architecturally. The bonds of community cannot be conjured in an instant, with a stroke of the planner’s pen; they too require time to develop. Today’s ways of building cities – segregating functions, homogenising population, preempting through zoning and regulating the meaning of place – fail to provide communities the time and space to evolve, which is needed for growth.
The Brittle City is a symptom of society operating on a large scale as a closed system. This view of society has two essential attributes: equilibrium and integration.
The closed system ruled by equilibrium derives from a pre-Keynesian idea of how markets work. It supposes something like a bottom line, in which income and expenses balance. In state planning, information feedback loops and internal markets are meant to ensure that programs do not ‘overcommit’, do not ‘suck resources into a black hole’ – such is the language of recent reforms to health services, familiar again to urban planners in the ways that infrastructure resources for transport get allocated. The limits on doing any one thing really well are set by the fear of neglecting other tasks. In a closed system, a little bit of everything happens all at once.
Second, a closed system is meant to be integrated. Ideally, every part of the system has a place in the overall design; the consequence of that ideal is to reject, to vomit out, experiences which stick out because they are contestatory or disorienting; things that ‘don’t fit’ diminish in value. Planning in the urban environment can practise repressive integration by emphasising context – a polite but potent word to cast suspicion, repressing anything that doesn’t fit in, ensuring that nothing sticks out, offends or challenges.
Emphasis on integration discourages experiment; as the inventor of the computer icon, John Seely Brown, once remarked, every technological advance poses at the moment of its birth the threat of disruption and disfunction to a larger system. So too in a city.
The twin sins of equilibrium and integration bedevil plans for education, welfare services or corporate vitality as much as in the Brittle City; moreover, the sinning sisters appear in both state capitalism or state socialism. The closed system betrays the twentieth-century bureaucrat’s horror of disorder.
The social contrast to the closed system is not the free market, nor is the alternative to the Brittle City a place ruled by developers. The cunning of neoliberalism speaks the language of freedom while manipulating closed bureaucratic systems for elites’ private gain. The true counterbalance of the closed system involves a different kind of social system.
The Open City
An open city works like Naples, a closed city works like Frankfurt.
The idea of an open city is not my own: credit for it belongs to the great urbanist Jane Jacobs in the course of arguing against the urban vision of Le Corbusier. She tried to understand what results when places become both dense and diverse, as in packed streets or squares, their functions both public and private; out of such conditions comes the unexpected encounter, the chance discovery, the innovation. Her view is reflected in the bon mot of William Empson that ‘the arts result from overcrowding’.
Jacobs sought to define particular strategies for urban development, once a city is freed of the constraints of either equilibrium or integration. These include encouraging quirky, jerry-built adaptations or additions to existing buildings; encouraging uses of public spaces which don’t fit neatly together, such as putting an AIDS hospice square in the middle of a shopping street. In her view, big capitalism and powerful developers tend to favour homogeneity: determinate, predictable and balanced in form; the role of the radical planner is therefore to champion dissonance. In her famous declaration, ‘if density and diversity give life, the life they breed is disorderly’.
If Jane Jacobs is the urban anarchist she is often said to be, then she is an anarchist of a peculiar, conservative sort. Her spiritual ties closer to Edmund Burke than to Emma Goldman. She believes that an open city is slow moving; people best absorb and adapt to change if it happens step by lived step. This is why Naples or New York’s Lower East Side, though resource-poor, still are sustainable and
