The Urban Tightrope: Balancing Individuals, Aggregates, and the Market's Mirage

 

The Urban Balancing Act Begins

Urban planning: it’s a bit like being a cosmic juggler. We're trying to catch a million individual desires while simultaneously keeping the whole darn aggregate city from crashing to the ground. It's a tightrope walk from the get-go. We want to make your life better, my life better, everyone's individual lives better in the city. But to do that, we have to plan in the aggregate, to think in terms of systems, flows, and population-level trends. Then, just to make things extra complicated, we throw in this persistent false dichotomy: the individual versus the group. As if we’re somehow forced to choose between celebrating individual freedom and pursuing collective well-being. And lurking in the background, whispering promises and threats, is the Market. That mystical, often misunderstood force that we’re told holds all the answers (or is the root of all evil, depending on your political persuasion). Are we supposed to worship at the altar of the Market? Ignore it entirely? Or, just maybe, treat it like… well, a tool? Urban planning, folks, is a balancing act of epic proportions. Let's grab our metaphorical balancing poles and try to navigate this urban tightrope without falling into the abyss of either-or thinking.

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.