From City-Machines to City-Organisms: Le Corbusier, Beaver Dams, and Why Urban Balance Matters

From City-Machines to City-Organisms: Why Urban Balance Matters

Beyond the Urban Machine

"Cities are a machine for living," declared Le Corbusier, a visionary whose ideas about urban design continue to evoke love and loathing alike. His vision captured the industrial-age obsession with efficiency and order, portraying cities as vast, well-oiled engines designed for optimal living. But what if our cities are something more? What if, instead of machines, they are organisms—living, breathing, evolving systems that thrive on the interplay of their myriad parts? Imagine cities as human-built hives, akin to beaver dams or anthills, constructed through collective effort and buzzing with social activity. Yet, like any thriving organism or hive, cities require balance. Just ask Jane Jacobs, who famously illustrated the "nothing fails like success" paradox, reminding us that even the best-intended developments can disrupt urban ecosystems if not carefully balanced. So, let's swap the city-as-machine metaphor for one that embraces the messy, vibrant, and wonderfully organic reality of our urban environments.

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Nothing Fails Like Success: The Jane Jacobs Theory

 

Jane Jacobs, the renowned urban theorist, challenged the conventional wisdom that "nothing succeeds like success." She argued that in many cases, too much success can actually lead to failure.

Jacobs' theory is based on the idea that diversity is essential for the vitality and resilience of neighborhoods. When an area becomes too specialized, it can become vulnerable to economic downturns and a loss of vitality.

The Characteristics of Living Cities

In biology, there are seven accepted characteristics of living things. These characteristics are used to determine whether a thing is living or non-living. Likewise, I think we can apply this logic to urban development. In my last post, I suggested that many of the large-scale developments that are meant to emulate an actual city are little more than a 'decorated corpse'. This time I hope to flush out how we can tell whether a development is a 'living' city or just a decorated corpse. I would like to use a list of characteristics somewhat like the example in biology, although I hope not to get bogged down in the analogy. Cities are, of course, not living organisms. They do not literally consume 'nutrients' and then excrete waste, though consumption and waste disposal are important parts of city planning. The point here is not to work hard on making a literal analogy with a living organism, but to figure out what the markers are that indicate that a city is healthy, unhealthy, or downright dead. There may be a better analogy than a living organism anyway, such as animal herds or insect hives. I'll leave fine-tuning the analogy to a future post. For now, we'll simply leave it as the 'living city'.

(As a side note, I would like to acknowledge the Center for the Living City, which does great work in advancing the understanding of cities and which, like myself, takes the term from Jane Jacobs. They do not, however, endorse my particular viewpoint or this blog.)

The first thing we must ask when trying to determine what characteristics we should look for is: What do we mean by 'living city' or 'healthy city'? Since we're not talking about an actual living organism, what determines whether the city, or some portion of it, is alive or dead? Healthy or unhealthy? To answer that, I think we have to ask what the city is for. Why do we have them? One might tread the path of history to define what a city is for, but I rather think that if the reason for the city isn't currently valid, then it isn't a valid reason for the city's (present tense) existence. So the question is: What is the city for. What does it do that other forms of human settlement can't? And let's be clear: I'm not only talking about the biggest cities. When I talk about cities, I'm also talking about the small ones. As long as the place is thought of as a city by the people who inhabit its sphere of influence, I think we can consider it a city. Not every development is a city, for sure, but I'm not interested in a hard line that defines cities vs other types of human development. At least not for the purposes of this discussion.

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.

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.