The manifesto of the Emergent Urbanism Network

As the idea of an emergent urbanism has become more popular, I’m receiving more and more emails asking me to look over some link or another and provide an opinion of the content. As I have unfortunately limited time, I cannot answer many of these requests. This led me to the realization that this little website needs to take a new, bold step into becoming something more than a blog/lesson, into an experiment in a new type of media.

When Le Corbusier set out to transform the world in his image, he did so by publishing his own magazines and books so that he would capture the imagination of humanity with all the power of the new forms of mass media, something that the traditionalist architects did not see any value in. It was his power to communicate farther and with more voice than any other that made him a legend. Despite all of our technological progress, we still experience the same form of mass media that Le Corbusier pioneered, and with mass media has come naturally the process of mass planning and mass architecture.

If there is to be a revolution towards a rediscovery of the more natural, more individual and more emergent forms of urbanism, there must also be a revolution in the media of urbanism. What is needed is not simply a change in form but a change in process all-around. The beginning of this change is a new way to communicate.

As social media networks have developed over the last few years (and it has taken very few years for them to stake their place alongside traditional mass media) we have rapidly accustomed ourselves to reading about only those things we find most relevant to our own perspective on the world, yet the information that is most relevant is spread out over myriad blogs, social feeds, and search engines. Those portals that do set out to provide news in urbanism rely on antiquated centralized editorial review processes to tell us what we should be interested in, in the same way Le Corbusier edited his magazine.

It is with these concerns in mind that I set out to design the Emergent Urbanism Network, a pioneering social media portal that aims to deliver to you the knowledge you need to advance your own personal growth as well as contribute to the growth of your peers. It is a portal that you create and you structure, in combination with every other member, into a publication that is infinitely scalable. It is an emergent form of media advocating for an emergent city.

If you are reading this, it means that you have become urgently interested in the subject of emergent urbanism. You may be a planner, an architect, a computer scientist, a consultant, an urbanist, an economist, a journalist, or anything else. Regardless of your title, your depth of interest is what matters most. Your contribution in the beginning of this new venture is critical, as it is the early structure you provide to the network that will shape its future. I need you to connect immediately and start telling us all about the issues and events you feel are related to urban complexity and emergence. You will help each other and you will help me as I continue to develop the technology to create the most powerful urban portal on the Internet.

Thank you all for your curiosity and your contributions. I’ll see you on the other side.

The patterns of place

(This article originally appeared in Get Ahead Magazine, for the Get Ahead Festival of independent short films in Brooklyn.)

When we speak of the identity of a place, we express a recognition of the patterns formed around us. We may not be conscious of them to the point of being able to draw them back with precision like Stephen Wiltshire, but we can remember them in the abstract, and in this way, identify different places from the abstractions we recall of their patterns. This is how one street can look sufficiently alike another that we can identify a neighborhood, and it is also why a landscape like Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto can feel like New York City, despite the fact that every object has been reconfigured to create a parody environment.

A city’s identity is made by the patterns selected by the people who built them. We can also say that these patterns are the fossil record of the people who inhabited a place. We can read the history, the culture and the sustainability of a place by the combination of its patterns. A building is a hierarchical computation of different processes nested within each other, and these processes can be substituted for others depending on what conditions are encountered.

Echoes of Holland

At the largest scale of patterns there is the building program, whether a house, a church, an office, easily recognizable in any cultural setting. These programs are realized using construction techniques that are conditioned on economic constraints. The Dutch who settled New York City brought with them their basic house program, but these had to adapt to the resources available by, for example, building in brownstone, an economic pattern. Despite this difference they kept features of their homes like stoops, patterns that were at first environmental but then became cultural.

As each successive culture either migrates to or emerges in the city, it needs to adapt the patterns of its buildings to fit its own practices. Fractals like these become habitual:

This is Chinatown in Brooklyn. We can tell it is Brooklyn because the basic patterns, program and materials, are Americanized Dutch. We can tell it is Chinatown because of the use of vertical commercial signs which are characteristic of oriental cultures (their writing being read top-to-bottom instead of left-to-right). The large-scale patterns are extended by smaller-scale patterns to form a full building fractal that is Dutch, American, New York and Chinese. This combination of pattern is the identity of Brooklyn, the people who have lived there and continue to live there.

One particular culture that has often been denounced as an anti-culture is the global corporation. Their aesthetic program has been to impose their corporate identity uniformly on communities, regardless of any consideration for local economic, environmental, or cultural factors. But there have been exceptions, such as the following case, where the corporation decided to extend the patterns of the neighborhood instead of imposing its own.

This Dunkin’ Donuts nested itself seamlessly in an old Dutch building next to a Chinese restaurant, and even improved upon it a bit with orange awnings that preserve the structure of the windows while announcing the presence of this corporate neighbor to everyone on the street. As well as being a demonstration of Dunkin’s neighborliness, it is also a demonstration of the sustainability of the neighborhood. The buildings are resilient, and despite the Dutch builders never anticipating that there could ever exist such a thing as a Dunkin’ Donuts, their patterns have been slightly adapted to fit today’s needs. Some day Dunkin’ Donuts will also be history. In its place will be some other culture which may or may not preserve traces of Dunkin’s presence, but the building itself will remain and serve a new purpose.

So far I haven’t said a word about architecture, which is simply because architecture does not enter the picture unless one has a lot of money for sculptural elements. It is possible to build a good neighborhood without architects, but a great one needs art, and that means getting some architects involved. The best architecture starts with utilitarian patterns, the same functional, economic and cultural patterns we see above, and then expands it by nesting sculptural elements, thus it is still possible to recognize identity of place behind the architecture. This architecture, sculpting the utilitarian shape of the building, becomes the final expression of identity, the artistic currents and fashions that propagate across cultures and then vanish, only to make periodic comebacks.

This is what Brooklyn architects did with these residential towers overlooking prospect park. What is in essence a stack of identical apartments made with the usual economic patterns was extended with sculptural ornament, most impressively around the otherwise obnoxious elevator shafts.

Looking at Brooklyn’s tallest landmark, the Williamsburg Savings Bank Tower, we see patterns that are Gothic, Romanesque, Italian renaissance, Art Deco, all nested within each other and wrapped around a stack of floors that can fulfill any purpose whatsoever. The final product is a building that is worth preserving from a bank, to dentist’s offices, to residences, because the patterns cooperate with each other instead of clashing, and answer our need to feel connected to any of these identities. This is another form of sustainability.

The tragedy of architecture in the 20th century, and the great confusion that came from it, is that modernist architects first banned sculptural elements in favor of purely standardized, globally uniform, utilitarian industrial patterns, then post-modernist architects declared that a building was only a sculpture for living, that the utilitarian should be subordinated to the architect’s artistic expression. The outcome has been a building culture that has no identity when it is not completely incomprehensible, and more than likely has no resilience and no future.

This “Dance Center” is a sad example of this confusion. Were it not spelled out in letters, would we be able to understand anything about this building’s identity? The people who occupy it? What any of its parts do, or if they do nothing at all and are simply there for visual effect? I can’t imagine a future for it. But there is worse.

This building makes no attempt at being anything other than mass human storage, the modernist tower block revived for the bubble epoch. It will likely be a financial failure for being too ambitious while being too redundant. If I were to take an apartment there, it would be impossible for me to tell which window is mine from the outside. What does this say about the people who built it? That they took the easiest path to financial income. What does this say about the people who will live there? That they have nowhere else to go. It is and will remain an alien in the neighborhood, a product that removes identity instead of contributing to it.

Today’s planning establishment attempts to reform the shape of our cities with “form-based codes” that dictate with precision the shape of every pattern. This comes at the cost of outlawing certain unforeseeable patterns that may make a net contribution to the identity of place. It also drives away people that need these patterns, and drains life that is needed to renew the neighborhoods. Last of all, it will not stop a monster like the example above. If instead of dictating shapes, we made it clear how to expand and preserve the neighborhood’s identity, we would all be much freer to live and express ourselves, adding to the history of our environment.

Leon Krier’s lesson in architecture

Review of The Architecture of Community – Léon Krier (2009), Island Press

The Amazon Santa visited me this year and left Léon Krier’s latest, and likely ultimate, publication, The Architecture of Community. (Thanks to those who made generous purchases on the Emergent Urbanism Amazon Store, remember that you can also purchase anything at all.)

Back in the 1970’s when architectural modernism began to fall apart or be outright demolished, the architectural intelligentsia decided that it was okay to start using ornament again, to make buildings flashy, to take the dry structures of modern buildings and decorate them with absurd icons whose purpose was to entertain long enough that no one would notice that the architecture was still terrible. Léon Krier, a renegade amongst renegades who had no formal architectural education, had an other idea in mind: that there was such a thing as objective laws in architecture, that these laws remained unchanged over time, and that classicism was the best expression of these laws. Any other architect’s career would be destroyed by such a claim in such an era – Léon Krier just kept going, publishing article after article, book after book, until the estate of the Prince of Wales gave him his big break and commissioned the design of an entire neighborhood based upon his ideas. If there is a neo-traditionalist movement in architecture and urban design today, it is because Léon Krier imagined it first. This book is the compilation of the product of his career as an architect, but mostly as a writer.

Having read through the book, my conclusion is that Krier gives a thorough lesson in architecture, taking obvious pleasure is shredding the myths of modernism to pieces and exposing its false prophecies. However, the text never goes beyond the most superficially descriptive, often involving comparisons and an appeal to common sense. While Krier can point out, using his trademark caricatures, how absurd the patterns of modern sprawl are, he has no explanation as to why such patterns would exist, except that it may be just one big conspiracy. He has even less to say about community, which is strange considering the word is in the title. It is as if in the vocabulary of neo-traditional architects community and space have become synonymous. (Many of the great villages and towns of Europe are dying because their community is dying, regardless of their physical form.) For this reason Krier produces a very sharp lesson in architecture, but provides no insight into morphology, and cannot really develop a model of urbanism that isn’t simply architecture at enormous scale. It should be no surprise that his disciples have practiced town planning the same way.

Despite his claims of providing a plan for the post-fossil fuel age, his projects require enormous concentrations of capital to develop, the kind of capital only princes have at their disposal, and provide no guarantee of ever being home to a true community. Although he demonstrates a sensibility, if not necessarily an understanding, for chaos theory and complexity, I am left wondering if he refers to it because he finds it convenient, or because it is true. He points out that fractal geometry has denied modernism the use of abstract forms as more rational geometric objects, and many of his drawings could be used as perfect examples of complex geometry. It is however not explained why anything is depicted the way it is, or how it could be the way it is. Architectural complexity is embraced, but the leap to emergence, crucial for any practical model of urbanism, is not there.

Most of the book consists of sketches, pictures and small essays whose intent is to persuade instead of to argue, and there lies the most peculiar thing about it. It is in precisely the same format that Le Corbusier once published his works of pioneering architectural propaganda. It is as if Krier sought to turn the very arms of modernism against it, to fight evil with evil with a classical counter-propaganda. Krier knows the power that architecture can wield – his monograph on the architecture of Albert Speer (Albert Speer: Architecture, 1932-1942) remains one of the most frightening architectural books I’ve yet seen, if there can be such a thing as a frightening architecture. He exposed fascism in all of its most seductive displays, at once explaining how the movement could wield power over so many followers, and why there would be a ban against classical architecture itself in the aftermath of the war. One could read hundreds of post-war philosophers without ever arriving at such a realization. Krier believes that classical architecture is a powerful cultural force that can also be used for good, that it is absurd to deny ourself this force because it was used to evil ends, and concludes as such his review of Speer. There is nothing so epic in this new book, although Krier dedicates an entire chapter to a plan for Washington D.C. that would “complete” the city (a plan he also displays on the cover), which shows us where his loyalties lie. What he doesn’t seem to know is how dangerous the power of propaganda is, and how using it may be feeding the very process he wants to denounce.

Hence, the most problematic issue with this compendium of Krier’s career is the medium itself. Krier presents drawings of an architecture that is rationalized and purified, playing it safe in order to rebuild architecture on its foundations. The great eclectic architecture of the 19th century, and the early 20th, is left out. That does not demonstrate confidence in one’s belief in laws of architecture, and will not provide anything greater to a new generation of architects than an alternative propaganda that may tap some deeper feeling, but won’t give them any arguments against other fashions that violate the laws. It also won’t give them the confidence to radically apply the laws in order to invent architectural patterns that meet the needs of today’s society, whatever you want to call it. (Post-post-modern? Ultra-modern? Webbed?) Krier may not have realized that modern architecture is a product of such propaganda, the result of architecture no longer being practiced by artisans for the benefit of their local community, but by writers and graphic designers trying to come up with the flashiest image they can place in a magazine. The quality of the building is irrelevant if the magazines drive your business.

Much like the medium created modern architecture, the medium also created medieval and neo-classical architecture. The information technologies of Gothic churches were primitive, but extremely complex. Neo-classicism could use printing, and that made mass propagation of patterns possible to the extent that these patterns were translated into drawings. The revival of the laws of architecture that Léon Krier dreams of will likely need a new medium, one that is characteristic of our society, to be accepted as evident. Until that is invented, Krier has done us all a great service by destroying the temple of modernism, leaving at least a clean slate and the right principles to start over.

New introduction to Emergent Urbanism

I’ve written a complete substitute to the old “Year One Review” page, as it was already more than a year old. Seizing the opportunity to experiment with the merits of hypertext, I wrote it entirely in hyperlinks to the relevant articles. If you are still fuzzy about how the ideas fit together, I’ve sorted them all out and placed them in their appropriate context.

Beginning Emergent Urbanism. Read it, share it, blog it, tweet it, facebook it, spread the word.

If you are looking for a more “academic” introduction, then my article in the International Journal of Architectural Research is still the most appropriate. You can also go through the presentation to the University of Montreal Complex Research Lab. (Translation still upcoming.)

An empty city for sale

If we needed any further confirmation that China is the champion builder of sprawl in this decade (sorry America, you don’t even come close against things like Dubai Marina), this reporter traveled to an entire city built by developers in Inner Mongolia, that, it turns out, no one wants to move to because there is no economy there, as compared to the traditional city down the road.

The economic dimension problem of sprawl building is shown here as evidently as it can be shown.

Emergent Urbanism at the University of Montreal

I was invited to the complex systems laboratory of the Université de Montréal this week to present emergent urbanism to their twenty-member large research group. Click through to SlideShare in order to see the full text of the presentation under the “notes on” tab. The entire text is in French, however I know a significant share of this website’s visitors enjoy French once in a while.



If someone wants to sponsor me for a translation in English, email me and I’ll upload one very soon. Otherwise my hands are quite full at the moment, it might be a while before I get around to it.

Thanks to Rodolphe Gonzales from the Complex Systems Lab for the invitation. You can read about their work here.

Defining a new traditional urbanism

Sometime last year this website attracted the attention of several members of the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism, an organization sponsored by the Prince of Wales Foundation in order to support and renew traditions of construction. While this organization does great work to preserve the techniques of traditional building cultures, they have yet to define what the traditional urbanism of their name really implies. The importance of such a definition I believe to be primordial. If modern planning measures continue to be adopted from one country to the next, any traditional technique of construction will become irrelevant, as they have in western industrialized (and post-industrialized) countries.

This all became obvious when a miniature controversy erupted and swept through the various internet discussion groups and blogs of the community over a proposed redevelopment of the Chelsea Barracks in London’s Chelsea borough. An old modernist military installation was to be torn down and replaced by its new owner, the Emir of Qatar, with a new modernist megahousing development designed by Lord Rogers. There was nothing particularly interesting about this Rogers design, but Lord Rogers having written the plan of London, a plan that specifically calls for better design, it made sense that a Rogers design would be swiftly approved by the planning authorities. Hiring Rogers was the most risk-free option available for a multi-million pound development project.

Getting wind of this, and noticing that the Rogers design was an unremarkable piece of rehashed modern housing, the Prince of Wales hired his preferred architect Quinlan Terry to sketch up a counter-proposal that was more in harmony with the architecture of the landmark Royal Chelsea Hospital across the street from the barracks, which he then proposed to the Emir of Qatar through his personal relationship with him. The Emir, alien to the local culture and uncertain of what London considers to be “good design”, then decided to dump Rogers and re-think the development.

The Prince of Wales and Quinlan Terry counter-proposal

Lord Rogers' Chelsea Barracks redevelopment proposal

I am not going to analyze the controversy from all of its fascinating angles, such as the design quality of the architecture, Lord Rogers (of the House of Lords) teaming up with British Republicans to denounce the monarchy’s interference with civilian life, or the absence of affordable housing in Chelsea. I am interested in only one question: is this traditional urbanism?

At first sight, the Terry design is reminiscent of the 18th/19th century style of palatial construction in Europe. (In fact one of the “blocks” features echoes of Buckingham Palace.) In terms of authenticity, the proposal is flawless. The Rogers proposal is also a palace, although one with much fewer attractive qualities. But does Chelsea really need a palace?

Providing a response to that inquiry is precisely what a system of urbanism is supposed to achieve. The system in place for London unfortunately requires that one have enormous financial means in order to participate in any kind of development, and inevitably that implies that only large speculative development will be so much as imaginable. The Chelsea Barracks proposal is entirely a product of modern urbanism, and by intervening into that system, the Prince of Wales and other traditionalists are sanctioning the very thing they claim to be opposed to.

As luck would have it, I wrote about the different processes of urban development using London neighborhoods such as Chelsea last year. Combining this with our models of the processes of urban emergence, we can develop the idea even further and try to conceive of a proposal for a traditional urbanism that develops the Chelsea Barracks site.

When I last covered Chelsea, I used its housing typology as an example of a linear, non-complex model of housing development. While linear housing is characteristic of the neighborhood, it is not the entire tissue of it. If we analyze the morphology of the neighborhood we find many clusters of housing rows, but these clusters do not necessarily repeat from one block to the next, and they are intermingled with other, uniquely programmed buildings of varying scale, the most prominent of which being the Royal Hospital. This means that, despite the neighborhood’s texture being only semi-random and not completely emergent, it performs at a remarkable level of complexity.

This kind of fabric is very common of British-American subdivision development during the 19th century. Here it is in a pure grid form in one of Montreal’s inner core “Plateau” neighborhoods.

We can observe that the middle of blocks is populated very differently from the major streets, despite the fact that they are not very different from a design standpoint. We don’t need to propose anything more complicated than self-optimization to explain this pattern. During development, housing builders would work from the center of blocks outwards, where there was the least perceptible traffic, and shops, churches and other activities located where there was the most traffic. The outcome is a complex tissue with perceptible characteristics, not only random noise.

In comparison, here is the texture of a new neighborhood in Las Vegas (Henderson), Nevada.

It is the same housing model repeated a thousand times, some lots facing backwards from the main roads. This new neighborhood might as well define linear development processes. The only feature of this neighborhood is the house, and so it can only function at any level of complexity by ejecting its residents out into town for any activity.

Of course some might say this is not a fair comparison. Those old neighborhoods are old, and therefore have had a long time to achieve maturity. But a neighborhood maturing implies that the neighborhood is planned to have a life cycle taking place in time, of which the early stage of growth is critical to its final morphology. What did a young, new neighborhood look like in 19th century British-American urbanism? It consisted mostly of very large lots of gardens and other large events (such as, for example, a Royal Hospital). These new neighborhoods were advertised as a pastoral refuge from the city. Look at this engraving of Milwaukee’s outskirts in 1858.

Its overall density is much lesser than that of Las Vegas new neighborhoods, and it has a distinctively pastoral quality. Yet what happened to those traditional neighborhoods was often that, very rapidly (the span of 2-3 decades) they became very dense urban neighborhoods, at which point the rate of new growth plunged and the fabric remained stable.

See for example this comparison of the urban fabric (1897-1915) of the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, from the book Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs.

In less than two decades the neighborhood was populated from a pastoral grid dominated by the campus of Columbia University to the dense, New York-style neighborhood it remains today. In these examples, growing a mature neighborhood was intrinsic to the development process adopted, and once this process wound down there was very little left to change to it. The neighborhood was mature because it had reached its equilibrium with the socio-economic context. Correcting deficiencies is what is meant by a neighborhood maturing, and developing a mature city implies that one is avoiding mistakes during its development. If we are employing a development model that is set in advance, no mistake can be either corrected or avoided during production.

Notice then that in traditional neighborhoods, the construction of mass-produced housing came last, after the neighborhood had established itself as a socio-economic system at the fringe of an existing city. Because of this, the mass-produced housing is a complement to that tissue, and contributes to the established complexity of the neighborhood, even super-charging it with population density. This not only ensured that there was no environmental alienation for the new residents, but also that there was a limit to how much repetition there could be from housing builders.

In modern urbanism we require all new developments to be programmed for a certain type of use, whether we are building a housing subdivision, an office or industrial zone, or a “mixed-used” development. If this is not know and debated in public, no development project can be approved. Only when a proposal has gone through this ordeal can anything be built, and making changes involves going through the process again, so the developers just subsidize the mistakes, or leave certain parts of the plan unrealized and a gaping hole.

In traditional urbanism this is never necessary. In fact it is possible for entire blocks to be left as pasture or gardens, creating an ultra-low density urban tissue. Only as further development becomes truly needed are these blocks transformed into housing and other programs. A critical difference is that no planning permit or approval is necessary to further develop a neighborhood. Instead the residents have an envelope of building rights set in building codes, and everything within that space is considered to be automatically approved. Because of this the development of a neighborhood can be undertaken in a large number of successive decisions, where the next building to be added is not only determined by the citywide market but also by the current state of the neighborhood. This in turn allows a local community and economy to grow, which is absent from modern developments.

This is all very interesting for new neighborhoods, but how would that apply to a small urban redevelopment site in the middle of a centuries-old neighborhood? Clearly we aren’t going to be building up from pastures. This is where a “new” traditional urbanism becomes relevant, as we need to invent a new process that restores the features of traditional urbanism, but can also function in the context of mature cities and modern structural requirements.

Although the redevelopment of a large urban block is usually undertaken as a large real-estate project, it can also be considered as a nested process of urbanism (urbanism within urbanism). Much like the city-wide process of urbanism is characterized by regulations intended to achieve equilibrium, the redevelopment of a block of the city should also be designed as to achieve its equilibrium with the city as a whole but (and here is the defining characteristic of a traditional urbanism) also within itself. This is what does not happen in linear development processes such as housing subdivisions, or 19th century housing terraces. They provide equilibrium with the larger scale, but amongst themselves they provide no complement. For this reason, although you’re likely to see a lot of some housing model repeated in one place, you’ll rarely ever see it used again elsewhere. Mass-production does not work for buildings the way it does in automobiles.

Time and interaction are the critical factors. The reason large-scale development like the Rogers and Terry proposals get approved and built is that everything must be conceived and approved in one step. The architectural design is rushed in order to make proposals as soon as possible. The form can’t evolve over the course of development. This process is justified by the need to control the architectural character of the city, but it is not necessarily so. It only follows from controlling architectural character because we rely on static information systems and processes to conduct building. In fact, many of the traditional building techniques that preservationists are attempting to preserve do not translate into modern information systems (building plans). If instead of drawing the full plans, the proposals simply supplied the component patterns and a parameter space for them, then there could be an infinite variety of different instances of these patterns populating the new space, all fitting a particular need and applying a specific method of returning to equilibrium. If we wanted to release control even more, we could define some buildings from the neighborhood as models and whatever patterns they featured as automatically approved. And seeing as this is the 21st century, we could define these patterns inside software that could randomly generate any possible permutation, such as the City Engine.

With the architecture out of the way, there would only need to be a fixed design for the frame of spaces around which the urbanization will take place. Grids are flat and unspecific, and so a good project will have a place structure that creates inequalities of movement. (Even New York’s grid has subtle inequalities in the short-blocked avenues and long-blocked streets, creating vastly different spaces in character.) Crescents, squares and alleys on a completely open surface should be the extent of planning a new neighborhood, and it will be important that this design have value all of its own. It is quite possible, for whatever economic reasons, that only part of the surface will be built, or even that nothing will be built. A good urban design must work in all states, including with nothing on it. Remove the buildings from the Terry proposal and there is still a rather interesting landscape. The Rogers proposal, without its buildings, has nothing. Terry is therefore much closer to the goal.

Negative space in modern plots

In the final step, how does the developer make money? Sustainable development, after all, has to be profitable in order to be sustainable. In a traditional city, plots were subdivided over time as the need arose. In a modern city lots are defined as a standard shape, and then later sold off for some standard price. This approach has the unfortunate side effect of creating a lot of negative space. The developer of the Chelsea Barracks could instead sell or auction off space as an elastic product. The first buyer would choose the first spot on the open surface, in relation to the hierarchy of the urban grid. The second buyer would place himself in relation to the urban grid and the first buyer. These buyers at first would come from long-time residents of the neigborhood aware of some particular way of extending the neighborhood, but unable to find a lot a space at the right size before this project became open to the public. This process would continue until all the space had been consumed, and the end result would be that all buildings would be related to one another through the sales process. If the space was priced high enough, the later projects would only be initiated after the initial ones had been completed, and the impact of time would generate the demand for building programs complementing the initial projects.

In such a way the urbanism within urbanism would create its own socio-economic subsystem, would feature a randomly adapted but uniform architectural signature, and would complement and extend the external urban tissue.

While I’ve detailed a process for developing a small block within a city, this process is just as applicable for doing development of new cities, or new suburbs of cities. There are fewer constraints and difficulties involved in these other cases, which is why I wanted to use the example of the Chelsea Barracks site. Urbanisation is a universal phenomenon, and although the patterns change, the underlying principles are everywhere the same.

Poundbury in China

Thames Town in Songjiang New City, Shanghai.

While creating a semblance of traditional European urbanism, Thames Town is only one enormous block of an entire new city of enormous developments, most in the Chinese style of giant aligned slabs. Far from creating a “new” urbanism, this development needs the enormous scale of modern Chinese urbanism to exist.

Down the canal from Thames Town’s lake, traditional Chinese organic urbanism persists, waiting to be rediscovered and adapted to the modern age and the enormous scale it requires.

Updated:

This great CBS News video report of the construction of Thames Town showed up in the WordPress automagically related links. (Thank you WordPress!) It shows the quality of the construction contrasted with the disappointment the Chinese feel about the social life of these environments. Sprawl alienation is truly a universal phenomenon.

Review of Radiant City

There is a scene early in the 2006 mockumentary Radiant City that provides the key explanation to the morphology of suburban sprawl. Our favorite writer James Howard Kunstler sits on a bench in a community bike trail that is enclosed in two rows of chain link fence in order to, I presume, secure it from the high-capacity arterial road that runs alongside it. The experience is vaguely what it must have been like to patrol the Berlin Wall, had it been encircled by an expressway. “Some clown in an office somewhere thought this would be a good idea, that’s why it’s here,” says Kunstler. “Not because anybody really tested whether or not it would feel good to be here.”

That’s all the film has to say about why sprawl is, and in fact there is nothing more to be said. The characteristic of a sprawl city is the absence of any intelligence in design. The rest of the movie is about how and why families cope with life in this intelligence-less environment. It does that with a narrative that is refreshingly honest and modern, despite not depicting a real family. It is shot on location in the outskirts of Calgary, a city that, thanks to a highly competent planning authority and an economic boom that has attracted large numbers of new citizens, has over the last decade built new developments at supernaturally huge scale.

The new neighborhoods are for the most part built of nice buildings, nothing to write UNESCO about but approaching genuine Victorian. Contrary to the suburban cliché, houses are built to a density that is comparable to city centers, which means there is adequate public transportation available. And in compliance with new planning regulations, developers have provided big clusters of condominium buildings to serve as “affordable housing”. With this setting, the directors have avoided the social exclusion issues that sometimes get bundled up with criticisms of the suburbs. In fact here the families explain that they left the center because it had become unaffordable for either their growing family or without shame-bearing subsidization (never mind affordable housing regulation being indirect subsidization), meaning the exclusion narrative is turned backwards. These people have been pushed out of the city.

What is there left to complain about then? Not very much, still there is a general awareness that there must be something missing, yet none of the characters can pinpoint it. They deal with boredom as best they can, the local teenagers finding, as all boys have ever done, that a muddy pit is all that’s needed for endless fun. Today’s boys turn this free space into a paintball game they call “escape to Mexico”, but it’s really just cowboys and indians for the postmodern age. Their fun is interrupted by a private security patrolmen hired by the builders to patrol the private streets, but these guards turn out to be benign bordering on benevolent. Incessant chauffeuring becomes the cause of a mini-crisis as poor husband Evan is forbidden from working on his car by his emasculating witch of a wife Anne, worried that such activities will send the car to the mechanic and leave her with the entire burden of chauffeuring the family on their maddening activities schedule.

If there is one recurring theme, it is that at every point the creative control of the environment has been taken away from individuals. The kids cannot play on empty lots, the father cannot risk working on his car, the space for any meaningful personal culture has been slashed to nearly nothing. The exception to this is Anne who gets to enjoy total control of the house itself, which she obviously takes great pleasure in when deciding how each room will be laid out.  At every point in the film where someone defends the choice of life in the suburbs it is either Anne or a female real estate agent involved.

As a form of passive-aggressive revenge, Evan signs up to be in a musical about suburban life where he and his male friends sing showtunes while dancing around with lawnmowers. (Lawnmowers having no utility in the postage-stamp sized lawns of the new suburbs, they are remembered in dance.) It is telling that Evan found out about the show by looking around the Internet. It is on the Internet that community and culture has exploded in the last years as the physical world has become more and more inaccessible. The Web 2.0 phenomenon has given the power to everyone to create something and express themselves, for better or worse. The Web has become a new city, and its different processes new forms of urbanism.

Sorely missing from the film, which features the opinions of architects, professors of philosophy and other intellectuals, are the opinions of the planners, politicians and developers who make this product. The planning system is as remote to the narrative as it is to people’s lives. While the complaint of the loss of citizenship implied by mass motorization is rehashed by an intellectual, what about the loss of citizenship implied by the planning process itself? All decisions about the shape of their environment has been taken long in the past, in the colorful words of Mr. Kunstler, by some clown in an office somewhere. The only thing left for citizens to do is to enjoy or hate their environment. They have been dispossessed of any power to shape it. Somewhere democracy of place was substituted for bureaucracy, and the best the citizens have been offered since is the chance to collectively shackle the bureaucrats through public design charrettes. The citizens have no more rights to create their city than citizens of Stalin’s Moscow did. That is the only aspect sprawl still has in common with Le Corbusier’s original vision for the Radiant City.

Yet the film does not reach this conclusion. If there is any conclusion, it is that everyone is helpless in the face of this seemingly unstoppable monster. As Joseph Heath says at the beginning, the critique of suburbia is the same it was two generations ago, everyone who lives in suburbia knows backwards and forwards the critique of suburbia, yet they still live there. Andrès Duany appears proposing that what sprawl needs is a grid and denser housing, yet the setting already has a grid and obviously the last thing it needs is even more houses.

A young woman states at the end, out of character, that she sees kids playing alone in suburbia and remembers her youth building giant forts with everybody in the neighborhood. I remember my happiest time growing up at the edge of the suburbs was building a treehouse on some leftover tree with the neighborhood kids. The treehouse was demolished because it was unsafe and then the tree cut down to build another house. I never saw any of those kids again.

That’s all community is, people making things together. That’s what creates the spiritual aspect of a place. Once we lose the freedom to do that, we can’t be citizens. We are just consumers of cities. Radiant City, by looking at life in suburban sprawl in its purest, best realized form, defines the right problem but fails to ask the right question. Perhaps citizenship is so far in the past that we can’t even remember to ask the question.

Radiant City

A film by Gary Burns and Jim Brown

Order it from Amazon.com.

Decoding Sidi Bou Sa’id

Besim S. Hakim has recently published a new edition of the study of the village of Sidi Bou Sa’id in Tunisia, the project that began his career decrypting the processes underlying the emergent morphology of Mediterranean towns.

In light of the major developments complexity science has made in the decades since, the preface of the new edition puts things in their updated context.

This preface was written in January 2009, thirty-one years after the first publication of this book in 1978. I have decided to re-publish it now due to its importance as an example of a built environment that came into being due to a generative system that is based on a sustainable framework of decision-making characterized by a bottom-up approach and guided by overarching generative proscriptive codes. The emergent result is a dynamic complex built environment that is not the brainchild of a master planner or architect. The exact configurations and form of the built environment is not known during the process of its formation and has a characteristic of unpredictability. This is one of the main features in natural systems that are associated with the phenomenon of emergence. What is known is that the result would fit well and in full balance within its immediate surroundings and will be a contribution that would maintain the integrity and quality of the village as a whole. The process is a result of small acts that in aggregate produces built form that is compatible with its immediate neighbors and that contributes to the high quality of the village’s character. I have researched and published in recent years numerous studies that explain how such an underlying generative system works. – Besim S. Hakim.

This kind of study is essential if we are to reinvent an urbanism that is truly traditional in nature and complex enough to achieve modern sustainability.

Michael Mehaffy’s review provides more context.

The subject of urban codes is now much-discussed in the fields of urban planning and architecture. But most codes are relatively static, specifying an end state to be achieved at one point in time. What Hakim describes here is a much more dynamic, rule-based process of shaping growth – more in line with the latest insights of complexity science about the growth of natural systems. It leads to the phenomenon of “emergence” – the appearance of unplanned and often unpredictable characteristics, that nonetheless have the characteristic of reinforcing and enriching what came before.

Hakim makes a comparison to the work of Christopher Alexander, who has focused on the way that settlements grow over time. Hakim notes a number of “patterns” that correspond to Alexander’s “pattern language” — a compendium of recurrent design solutions, together with the rules that govern how they go together, like the rules of grammar. Alexander argues that such patterned growth over time has produced the beautiful and complex places all around us, in contrast to our more “mechanical” methods today.

For Hakim, such places have achieved a form of sustainability that is well worth our study, since so many of them have, after all, “sustained” for centuries. The subject of urban sustainability is of course a much-discussed one, since buildings and urban environments are responsible for over one-third of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change, to say nothing of other ecological damage. But as many critics point out, sustainability is not just a bolt-on affair: it goes to the way people interact socially and economically, and the way, as Hakim points out, that small acts contribute (or don’t) to the quality and durability of their surroundings, and the built environment as a whole.

If you are interested in the contrasting principles of traditional urbanism as opposed to traditional architecture in a modern planning system, this book can be your guide.

Sidi Bou Sa’id, Tunisia: Structure and Form of a Mediterranean Village

edited by Besim S. Hakim