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Politics is tinkering. Cities are machines. More on the reasons I hate suburbs. And shopping malls. And some possibly naive things about Motown.
A place to live vs a place to exist
There’s a simple two-part test that any space-for-living needs to pass, in order to be habitable:
1. Are there neutral, public spaces for people to meet up, socialise and exchange information in both planned and spontaneous activities?
2. Are there run-down areas where people can open up new enterprises and experiment?
Most suburbs fail both of these tests.
Suburbs: the Worst of Both Worlds
In The Information Architecture of Cities, L. Andrew Coward and Nikos A. Salingaros explore the idea of the city as a complex system, or brain. People are neurons:
The networks of a city — the paths, roads, telecommunications, etc. — are the mechanisms that support information exchange. Nevertheless, a city processes information rather than merely moving it around. . .
The use of urban space is linked to the information field generated by surrounding surfaces, and to how easily the information can be received by pedestrians. A primary information exchange is a pedestrian going from one point to another. He or she observes things that are unrelated to the primary reason for movement. This information is functional; it can recommend secondary behaviors to the observer who is executing a primary information exchange. A successful city is one in which even simple movements are a rich and rewarding experience.
Suburbs, retail parks and other mono-zones appear simpler and thus cheaper. But they still need to ‘communicate’ in order to process information and solve problems. This becomes hugely expensive and needs expensive infrastructure which is unable to easily react to change, let alone create it.
The geographical separation of residences from workplaces (enforced by postwar monofunctional zoning) is a case in point. Because these two urban regions — apartment blocks or groups of suburban houses on the one hand, and office towers on the other — interact so strongly with each other as a whole, they do NOT define separate functional modules, despite the simplistic expectations due to spatial clustering. Instead, the geometry forces functional module formation of the most inconvenient kind, with information exchange that is very expensive to maintain because of long links. The modules that do form are too weak, and suffer from overextended transport connections and a lack of internal coherence.
Another problem with this example is that there is simply no way to form modules of intermediate size. A stable hierarchy of different modules that fit within larger modules can never evolve in a monofunctional urban region; yet we know this to be a crucial feature of any working complex system. The nuclear household and its immediate connections defines the smallest module containing work, school, office, and supermarket. In the majority of cases, there is no successively larger module that contains this elementary module — one immediately jumps from the nuclear household to the entire city. This lack of hierarchy is pathological from a systems point of view. . .
High-rise office buildings and horizontal “office parks” are not functional modules. Typically, there is very little to no interaction between different offices in the same building or “park”, compared to the exchange between each individual office and its headquarters, branch locations, customers, suppliers, bankers, etc. This elementary analysis invalidates both the office building and the “office park” as useful urban typologies, despite their recent proliferation. For similar reasons a region of suburban houses is not a functional module. Creating office blocks and suburban house groups makes all genuine functional exchange high cost (or imposes systemic isolation). This is the system force behind Jane Jacobs’ observation that successful city neighborhoods are always mixed usage. . .
Nodes that do not form part of a larger module are often parasitic to the city, since they use its infrastructure without contributing to an overall functional coherence. Nevertheless, that is how most restaurants, stores, supermarkets, and office buildings are built nowadays. Entirely surrounded by an isolating parking lot, they are designed to be built in the middle of a wilderness, yet they are forced right into the urban fabric, tearing it in the process. Restaurants designed to work as highway truck stops are routinely erected inside the city, and of course they don’t belong to it. People working in a nearby office building, which could provide clientele at lunchtime, have to drive their cars around a busy road to get to a restaurant that is literally next door.
Suburbs make it harder for people to both socialise and work. And they make it harder for societies to innovate; they promote a poverty of aspiration (if you discount the ambition of people like me to leave).
Modern societies have expended great deal of energy on managing and preserving ‘nature’ by creating reserves, National Parks and Areas of Outstanding [insert idea denoting societal value here]. We haven’t done as good a job at managing and preserving grime and run-down areas. Suburbs lack wabi-sabi; where is the space to open a business or start some new, as-yet-undreamed-of, enterprise or madcap scheme? If you felt like going on a wild goose chase or tinkering with your neighbourhood, where would you go? Politics and civic responsibility can never be about planning because the world is too chaotic. Politics is tinkering.
City-Makers’ Manifesto
I love the idea of the Repository of Objects:
The late experimental filmmaker and pioneer of underground cinema, Jack Smith, was once asked “Have you ever thought of another type of society?” His response, in part, was:
“… Like in the middle of the city should be a repository of objects that people don’t want anymore, which they would take to this giant junkyard. That would form an organization, a way that the city would be organized…the city organized around that. I think this center of unused objects and unwanted objects would become a center of intellectual activity. Things would grow up around it.”If the world is equal to Smith’s “city,” Detroit is the repository of objects.
Detroit gets a lot of bad press. But I’d put money on more exciting things coming out of Detroit than the suburbs where I grew up.
More:
- Did I mention that I hate suburbs?
- If you haven’t read Tim Maly’s Gradual Calamity post over at Quiet Babylon, you really really should.
- Check out the series of photos on incipient Desire Paths in Detroit (also linked to above as ‘more exciting things’)
Image of Detroit: urban agriculture from Anthropik Network. Everything else from Urbanophile or screengrabs from sites linked here.
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[...] I want to tinker and make stuff.* [...]