The Kind of Problem a City isn't: Why Battle Burnham, Part II

The last chapter of Jane Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities is entitled 'The kind of problem a city is'. In that chapter she describes the three kinds of problems science has learned to address, in chronological order: problems of (1) simplicity, (2) disorganized complexity, and (3) organized complexity. Problems of simplicity are problems with two variables. Disorganized complexity refers to a number of variables too large to track individual relationships, for which statistical methods have been developed. The last problem, science is just beginning to deal with. They are problems of systems, which I wrote about in last week's post, though the idea of systems theory was not to be developed for a few more years. Jacobs is essentially talking about understanding cities as systems of human beings. She references the fact that systems theory began its popularization in the fields of biology because modern biology could not have progressed by trying to understand an organism through statistical analysis alone anymore than they could have progressed by simply analyzing the individual chemical reactions at the cellular level. The organism, as well as ecosystems, must be examined as an interconnected system of parts in order to understand the functioning and purpose of any individual part. Cities too, must be understood as a complex system of interconnected parts if we are to understand them in any useful way. Jacobs goes on to describe cities as being part of nature just as their creators,  human being, are. Since cities are the creations of human beings, they are part of, if not erupting directly from, nature. This is why the same methods of analysis that are used for biological systems are useful in examining cities. 

Daniel Burnham circa 1890s

Which brings me to my focus for this blog. While Jacobs argues for understanding cities through a lens we now call systems thinking, my focus is somewhat more narrow: separating out what kind of problem the city isn't. To be precise: it isn't a design problem. One of the main obstacles to solving the problems of the city in the twentieth century was the ongoing assumption that urban problems were problems of architecture and/or design. In my opinion, this sort of thinking (in the United States, anyway) can be traced back to Daniel Burnham, the turn-of-the-century architect who popularized the City Beautiful movement. If the choice of Burnham seems arbitrary (there are plenty of architect-planners to choose from), it is the lack of any concern for his work's connection to urban ills that truly sets Burnham apart. Ebenezer Howard, Le Corbusier, and Frank Lloyd Wright all had visions of how their future societies would work, although they all shared the misconception that rebuilding was the path to social reform. Burnham was distinct from these others (if not completely unique) in the idea that it was the architecture and urban design itself  that was sure to cause the improvement in society. The battle, though, to be sure, is against the idea of design as planning, and not against Burnham specifically, or any of his contemporaries or the inheritors of the Burnham legacy. I am using Burnham as a makeshift metonym for this conception of planning.

Cities as Systems: Systems Theory as a way of understanding urbanity

This week I'd like to introduce an idea that I don't think is all that popular in the practice of planning: systems theory. Understood through system dynamics, what we are talking about it a way of understanding how the world works. Often applied to ecosystems and physiology (including human), systems theory can be applied in a wide variety of arenas including cities. System dynamics is intended to provide a model of how systems work in place of standard economic models. These system dynamics models help to facilitate systems thinking. I'd also like to look at systems theory applied to an example urban problem and explain why it's important for planners (as well as citizens) to begin using systems thinking when contemplating problems that face urban areas.

 To introduce these ideas with a short history: System theory began with Ludwig von Bertalanffy's book on the subject, first published in 1968. Among its precursors are Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim's work in the nineteenth century, and cybernetics, a related field. Systems Philosophy was part of a new group dubbed 'Systemics', which included the domains of (systems) technology and science as well. System Dynamics is a way of modeling complex, nonlinear systems that include stocks, flows, and feedback loops. This was done with software developed in the 1950s and 60s for industrial purposes but in 1969 the book Urban Dynamics introduced the idea that systems thinking could be applied to urban issues. Systems thinking then, is an approach to understanding the world around us by not just looking at the component parts, but how they interact and affect each others' behavior.

Dynamic Stock and flow diagram of Adoption model(small version). Diagram created by contributor, with software TRUE (Temporal Reasoning Universal Elaboration) True-World
Model from article by John Sterman (2001) Systems dynamics modeling: tools for learning in a complex world, California management review, Vol 43 no 1, Summer 2001}}

Cities are systems. Much as we now recognize that the biological world is full of interconnected systems called the ecosystem, we should now also realize that there is a mirror of that world in the city. Urban systems are composed of people and organizations of people. Towns and cities are made of both constituent parts:  businesses, churches, schools, political organizations, social groups, etc. as well as the interconnected stocks and flows that make for complex systems. All of these parts interact and create communities that themselves overlap and interact to form neighborhoods, towns and cities. Understanding cities as systems helps us to understand the reverberant consequences of our actions in urban planning.

Restrictive and Prescriptive Zoning; the land of the free; and the difference between 'can' and 'should'

In my first post, I made a passing reference to Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk's Smartcode, in which the idea of transect based zoning is introduced. In this week's post, I would like to further explore the idea of zoning by discussing the history of zoning in the United States, giving a passing nod to transect based zoning, and looking at the idea of zoning itself. I would like to pose some basic questions about zoning, question its legitimacy, and ask if there's a better way to view zoning. I would also like to introduce new ideas regarding zoning categories, how zoning fits (or doesn't) into a larger legal framework, and how we might be able to move forward with a better framework for thinking of zoning.

Firstly, I should note that I will be coming back to the idea behind Battling Burnham and the unrecognized dichotomy between planners and designers in future posts, but I wanted this to be one of my first posts because it's quite important to me and because it's one of the biggest, nearly unaddressed issues in urban planning. Virtually everyone agrees that the separation of uses in urban development has led to disastrous results for cities. That it has been disasterous has in fact become canon for urban planners. The culprit behind the separation of uses? Euclidean zoning. Through the supreme court case of Euclid v. Ambler, zoning was bolstered and began to spread quickly throughout the United States and around the world. The purpose? The separation of uses. The idea behind this traditional idea of zoning was that industry should not be near residences (sounds reasonable), residences should not be near commercial (I'm not sure what that logic is...) and nothing should be near agriculture (sorry, farmers). This, in short, has been one of the major causes of urban sprawl over the past century. As soon as people began to be removed from life's everyday activities, communities began to dissolve. People no longer saw their neighbors at the store, and neighborhoods lost the interconnectedness that had previously made the neighborhood such an important element in urban life. To be sure, this effect was not felt overnight. Nor was zoning the only thing that led to it. It took many years for most cities to adopt Euclidean zoning and, even then, the policies took many years to have their effect since these types of policies affect new development, not old. Nevertheless, after a few decades and with the help of a new national highway system, the benefits of living in the city (easy access to daily needs like stores, restaurants, and employment) had been negated by exclusive use zoning and America was on its way to the suburbs.

And so zoning progressed largely unchanged through the twentieth century. Then came Duany Plater-Zyberk and their Smartcode. And suddenly the obvious presented itself. Euclidean zoning gets its name from the Supreme Court case where zoning was determined to be legal, not mandatory. Cities are allowed to make decisions about if and what kind of zoning they would like for their town. Hidden within the Smartcode, which focuses on regulating architectural elements, setbacks, lot size, etc., is a completely new way of looking at zoning, the transect based approach. In journalism, this is what's called 'burying the lead'. Codes governing architectural elements are nothing new. I don't think they've ever been quite this well organized before, but the really interesting development in the Smartcode is the transect based approach to zoning. The real advantage to the transect based approach is that it recognizes the way cities actually develop, rather than attempting to impose an artificial order based on a 'vision' of how the city should develop. The basic principle of transect based zoning is that the rules that govern use and densities should come from where the zone falls in the urban hierarchy. The most intense, dense, and diverse area of the city should be downtown, while those things would be decreased as the zone moves farther away from the city center towards agricultural land on the outskirts of town. This, in theory at least, would help to avoid the wasted potential of a city that uses Euclidean zoning. That potential comes both in the form of unmet demand for housing (for example) in a commercial zone, as well as the obvious empty, undeveloped lots in areas that have been zoned commercial where there is no excess demand for commercial development (with similar examples valid in other areas of the city).

Why Battle Burnham?

As a first post and explanation, I want to address the title of my blog and what the blog is supposed to be about. I say supposed because I cannot guarantee that I will not drift from the main topic from time to time but I do guarantee that I will at least make feeble attempts to relate the issue I'm on about that week back to the general topic at hand. That topic being: Urban Planning. More specifically, differentiating between the practice of planning as described by the late Jane Jacobs and the profession as generally practiced and epitomized by Daniel Burnham.

I came to the conclusion that there is a conflict between the two conceptions of urban planning after attending two years of schooling for a masters degree in urban planning. The thing that inspired me to try to move into the field of urban planning was mostly my undergraduate degree, which was a BA in Geography with a focus on Urban Studies.

While an undergraduate I read Jane Jacobs' landmark book on Urban Planning, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which is what interested me in urban studies initially. I was invigorated by Jacobs' assessment of city planning and her attack on the contemporary practice. Jacobs' view was that city planning should be based on an understanding of how cities work rather than on how they look. For me, it was a detailed, but simple argument about placing function over form.

This is why, despite her much-publicized battles with Robert Moses, Jacobs' main conflict (in my opinion) was not with Moses (her contemporary) but instead with the late 19th, early 20th century idea of planning, epitomized by Daniel Burnham. Jacobs' critique of city planning as it stood at the time, however, gave less importance to Burnham, but instead focused on Ebenezer Howard, Le Corbusier, Lewis Mumford and others. Burnham's City Beautiful movement (if I may ascribe the movement to him) is described in Death and Life as "the other, less important line of ancestry in orthodox city planning." 

Mrs. Jane Jacobs, chairman of the Comm. to save the West Village holds up documentary evidence at a press conference at Lions Head Restaurant at Hudson & Charles Sts., 1961 (New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, Reproduction Number: LC-USZ-62-137838)

Jacobs goes on to describe many of the problems facing contemporary cities when she wrote the book (1961) which, I was surprised to find, are largely the same problems which face cities and city planning today. The front lines of the battle have moved, but they are generally the same battles. And many of the lessons can easily be transplanted to other cities. To be sure, Jacobs was clear that she was a writing a book about New York, not making an attempt to write a treatise that would give instruction on the practice of city planning to all cities, for all time. And yet, in her attempt to avoid such a thing, she clearly created a work that spoke to people far beyond New York about the design-oriented origins of city planning. Jacobs' disciples, from citizen activists to professional planners, have appreciated her work and her perspective, which boils down to the simple recognition that it is more important to define what type of problem a city is than what form a city should take. Function over form.