The City Perfect is a Flawed Idea: In Praise of the 'Offal City'

Is the 'City Perfect' a mirage?

Embracing the messy beauty of the 'Offal City' – where urban life truly thrives.

Beyond the Immaculate Urban Vision

"Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood…" So went the rallying cry of the City Beautiful movement. Grand boulevards, neoclassical monuments, parks as manicured as a politician's promises – the vision was intoxicating: a city sculpted into an image of pristine, idealized beauty. But let’s be honest, the "City Beautiful," for all its aesthetic aspirations, always felt a little… unattainable. A bit like chasing a mirage shimmering on the urban horizon. Because here's a philosophical truth bomb for your morning commute: perfection? It’s a myth. Ask Plato. He’d tell you all about “Forms” – perfect, ideal versions of things that exist only in the realm of pure thought, while earthly reality is just a pale, imperfect imitation. Cities, bless their messy, chaotic hearts, are resolutely earthly. They are tangled, evolving, delightfully flawed creations. Even Navajo weavers, masters of intricate patterns, traditionally weave a deliberate imperfection into their rugs – a humble nod to the idea that only the divine is truly perfect. Maybe, just maybe, we’ve been chasing the wrong urban ideal all along. Maybe the “City Beautiful” was a seductive, but ultimately misguided, pursuit. Maybe… the flawed city, the imperfect metropolis, is actually… perfectly itself. And maybe, just maybe, it’s time to embrace the messy, un-sanitized, gloriously real city – the "Offal City," if you will – in all its gritty, delicious, and utterly essential glory.

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.