Scattered Work

Geoffrey West on the scaling of cities

This discussion of scaling in biology, cities, and companies is quite remarkable. Geoffrey West (of the Santa Fe Institute) explains what network theory can tell us about how cities and companies grow. It’s almost an hour long, but very much worth the time.

[hat tip Andrew Sullivan]

Tags: Geoffrey West, scaling, urban growth

The founding metaphor

Then we do one other thing before we ever begin work… we start to examine metaphorical values. For instance, take the harbor at Baltimore. A harbor, if you look at the founding metaphor of a harbor, is a place where fresh and salt water meet and mix. It is a place of generation. It’s really an ecological marketplace. There the harbor’s changed to a human marketplace. The same values hold, but if someone (as in Baltimore) puts an eight lane road around the harbor, you have breached the the metaphorical values. Therefore, you must first restore the metaphorical values, before you can restore the others, and these values drive our art. That’s why we set up a reconnection between the harbor and the rest of the city.

– Newton Harrison

Tags: Baltimore, ecology, harbors, Helen Meyer Harrison, metaphor, Newton Harrison

Training dog owners

I’ve been working my way through a long essay about the theories of social control that justified the creation of many parks in the United States. It’s a fascinating look into how the politics of public space has evolved in our country, and I’m sure I’ll have much more to say about it in the coming weeks. I’m kind of awed by the levels of idealism and cynicism that can exist so close together — even though I just observed astounding levels of idealism/cynicism in the build up to the Iraq war and then the battle over the Affordable Care Act. It gets me every time.

Here’s Frederick Law Olmsted describing parks as a place where people “with an evident glee in the prospect of coming together, all classes largely represented, with a common purpose, not at all intellectual, competitive with none, disposing to jealousy and spiritual or intellectual pride toward none, each individual adding by his mere presence to the pleasure of all others, all helping to the greater happiness of each.”

And yet, here he is describing the lower classes who he proposes will be lifted up by his transcendent parks, men who “are either in a diseased condition from excessive devotion of the mind to a limited range of interests, or their whole minds are in a savage state; that is, a state of low development.” So much for disposing of spiritual and intellectual pride.

But reading this, and watching the completion of new park land along the San Antonio River, and hearing all the discussions of how to remake HemisFair Park, I begin to wonder: what do contemporary park planners want from their parks? Are these mere amenities for the people of the city, or is there some form of cultural training that enters into the calculation?

And then, as I was doing research on river water quality issues in San Antonio, I came across this in the Upper San Antonio River Watershed Protection Plan:

Dog parks provide enclosed areas where owners can let their pets run off-leash and typically include signage reminding the owners to remove waste.  In addition to providing a public amenity, these dog parks also help to transfer the conscientious behavior of responsible pet owners who pick up after their pets to less conscientious owners, which helps to establish a social norm (EPA, 2004).

So we’ve been chastened a bit. But we haven’t given up hope that parks could transform our city, if not into a bastion of social harmony, at least into a place without much dog poop.

Tags: behavior, Frederick Law Olmsted, parks

Discovering Urbanism

The project of writing a blog has a lot to do with engaging in dialogue. And so the decision to relaunch Scattered Work as a planning blog for San Antonio has led me to start exploring the urbanist blog scene. One site I’ve just come across this morning is Discovering Urbanism (via Market Urbanism via this Kevin Drum post). The newest entry on the site makes a very important point: the idea of revitalizing the city core is at heart an ethical project. Downtown gives us a place to encounter people different from ourselves; and without those encounters we have very little reason to think about ethics or the nature of community.

This relates to my previous post about Facebook and the balkanization of the Internet. But the big question is whether we are going to allow ourselves to embrace social instability on a personal level, and bring improvisation into our interactions. It’s a very difficult and awkward thing to do. Most of us are very relieved to move past our teen years, where the bulk of our social improvisation happens. I hope to make the case in the coming months that our spaces can and should be constructed to encourage the exploration of new social patterns. I currently have no idea how this would look, but with the help of blogs like Discovering Urbanism, I’m going to take a crack at it.

My first real post on Scattered Work mentioned the importance of stable social space (i.e. the deep social connections formed in neighborhoods where several generations stay basically in the same place), and now I’m praising instability in our personal interactions. Yes, both are important, and yes, I think this is a central paradox of planning, and well, living. I expect to be banging my head against this paradox a lot.

Tags: ethics, identity, improvisation

Silence and Void

In 2008, Anjali Gupta, then editor of Art Lies, asked me to write a feature on the relationship between John Cage and Buckminster Fuller. I certainly wasn’t an expert on Cage, and hardly knew anything about Fuller. I dug through what I had, bought some books, and sent many queries to Google. I ended up writing Silence and Void: Cage, Fuller, and Urban Space, tracking the two thinkers’ similar philosophical foundations and ultimate divergence, concluding with:

[Cage] had come to believe that harmonically structured, emotionally fraught music could live alongside formless, chance-based compositions. Meanwhile, at the time that Cage gave this interview, Fuller was still railing against the failings of Bauhaus architects. With this in mind, we can see why Fuller’s vision of the future, in some ways, missed the mark. While the increasing availability of inexpensive travel and communication has certainly changed the way our society functions, it has not changed the human need for shared social space. Fuller’s Dymaxion house disregarded the socioeconomic and emotional aspects of urban architecture in favor of lightness, portability and conservation of materials. The idea of rootedness might have had little interest to a man who constantly moved about the world. But the ability to move freely and communicate over long distances has never displaced our need for stable social space any more than the ability to appreciate chance sounds has diminished the enjoyment of structured music.

While I was writing this essay, I was also exploring the south side of downtown San Antonio, riding my bike by vacant buildings transforming into architecture offices and condos. Living among these developments while reading about urban space and structural principles sparked an interest that I haven’t been able to shake.

Later, reading Jane Jacobs, I became more deeply aware of the importance of “stable social space.” While criticizing New York’s destruction of “blighted” neighborhoods in the 50s, Jacobs eloquently demonstrates the value of social networks for promoting safety, well-being, and general civic responsibility. When the neighborhood is destroyed, and the inhabitants scattered, the social fabric is disrupted with far-reaching consequences. This is the familiar argument against gentrification. In San Antonio, we’ve seen this happen with the construction the Victoria Courts in the 1940s, HemisFair in 1968, and the Alamodome in 1993, to name a few of the most well-known displacement projects.

Jacobs spilled a lot of ink railing against government intervention in neighborhoods that, though perhaps poor, are safe and functional. Certainly some of this displacement had a racist motivation, as the black community was pushed steadily to the east side, in the case of San Antonio (although San Antonio is less segregated than many cities, as can be seen in these fascinating “race maps” of American cities). Despite all this, city planners are, of course, capable of doing good things.

So the question becomes: How can we, as a city, allow the aleatory to live alongside the structured? Or better, how can we create structures, like Cage did, that allow us to see the beauty in the unstructured decisions of each individual?

Tags: Alamodome, Buckminster Fuller, downtown, gentrification, HemisFair, Jane Jacobs, John Cage, racism, social networks